Product Description

Here is the long-awaited, authoritative, unabridged translation of "Petersburg", the Chef d'oeuvre of Symbolist writer Andrei Bely. Nabokov has ranked "Petersburg", beside Joyce's "Ulysses", Kafka's "Metamorphosis", and Proust's "La recherche du temps perdu", as one of the four great works of prose fiction of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #102734 in Books
• Published on: 1978-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
" ... a translation that captures Bely's idiosyncratic language and the rhythm of his prose, and without doing violence to English, conveys not only the literal meaning of the Russian but also its echoes and implications." The New York Review of Books "This translation of Petersburg finally makes it possible to recognize Andrei Bely's great novel of 1913 as a crucial Russian instance of European modernist fiction." Inquiry "All people who go in for the B's - Beckett, Brecht, Bunuel - better get hold of Bely. He came first, and he's still the best." Washington Post Book World " ... a jewel-cutter's showcase." Kirkus Review " ... the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century." Simon Karlinsky

Customer Reviews

One of the greatest works of art
For 30 years I've proselytized this book, but converted not a single person. In my opinion this is consistently the greatest work of art ever created, greater than 'Tristan and Isolde', 'Ulysses', 'Moby-Dick', 'The Idiot', 'Hamlet', or any of those other works of genius which find profound patterns of beauty in extremes of human chaos. This plunges deeper into the chaos and brings up stranger, wilder, more intimate forms of beauty than any of them, and then weaves them into a more coherent whole. I suppose most people can't get past the narrator being an unreliable, disturbingly schizophrenic prat, out-Gogoling Gogol; but this is a joyful, wonderfully funny subversion of all our comfort zones. Oh well.

Malmstad and Maguire's translation is the one to get, not McDuff's turgid effort.