St. Petersburg, Andrei Biely

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse how the image of the city and its citizens in Andrei Biely’s masterpiece book, St. Petersburg (or Petersburg), shares with other modernist novels a similar thematic and structural configuration. The novel stands out for the beauty of its poetic language as well as for all the innovations usually ascribed to the modern novel. The work is published earlier than other important works in twentieth-century narrative. This paper begins with an introduction to author and to the Russian Symbolist movement. Later it focuses on the analysis of relevant role of city in St. Petersburg, as another character, immortal and active, and the study of urban figures, in a pre-revolutionary Russia: what happens to them, how they live city life experience and how they are conditioned by their environment and historic circumstances. The city of Petersburg is full of meaning.