Map of St. Petersburg, 1893
Picture sourceI wasn’t sure what I would read next but after opening Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and reading the two-page prologue, I am hooked. So Petersburg it is. I am reading the Pushkin Press release, translation by John Elsworth.

A quick internet search on the author and title shows more available on the book than I expected. I made the decision to avoid reviews on the book because I wanted to come to the work fresh. All of which means this online resource post will contain fewer links (at least initially…as with other resource posts I may add more links later), focusing on historical context and biographical information. On to some links:

The Wikipedia entry on Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), which also has links at the bottom of the page for a short story and a few of his poems

For some context of the historical setting of the novel, the Russian Revolution of 1905

Mapping Petersburg “explores the everyday life and the material, political, and literary culture of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd during the First World War) at the beginning of the twentieth century”. Note: the initial link was to a site now dead. I have updated the link to a different Mapping Petersburg site.

The book’s epigraph comes from Alexander Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, probably worth visiting before starting the book

Professor Elizabeth Beaujour’s page for her Modern Russian Literature course at Hunter college provides several links for Petersburg (and several other 20th century Russian writers)

Update (7 Dec 2011): “The Moving Tide of Abundance: Petersburg by Andrei Bely”, an essay by Malcolm Forbes, can be found at The Quarterly Conversation (link dead). An excerpt from the essay can be found here.

Demonstration on October 17, 1905 by Ilya Yefimovich Repin
Picture source