After enlisting in a revolutionary terrorist organization, the university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is entrusted with a highly dangerous mission: to plant a bomb and assassinate a major government figure. But the real central character of the novel is the city of Petersburg at the beginning of the twentieth century, caught in the grip of political agitation and social unrest. Intertwining the worlds of history and myth, and parading a cast of unforgettable characters, Petersburg is a story of apocalypse and redemption played out through family dysfunction, conspiracy and murder.



Andrei Bely (whose real name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), was born in 1880 into a family of illustrious intellectuals. Bely's writing heavily influenced the Russian Symbolist movement and the subsequent Modernist school - his significance in world literature is often compared to that of James Joyce. He died in Moscow in January 1934.