A Russian Comic Masterpiece

George Reavey in his foreword to this edition calls St. Petersburg a novel “conceived on many levels and deliberately constructed to produce an impression of chaos and nightmare,” while John Cournos, the translator, informs us that it is “a vast fantasy, at times like a nightmare, realistically constituted as it is for the most part of the stuff of daily life, yet all of it built up like a piece of music, with a motif of terror, oddly mixed with humor, running through and holding the diverse fragments together in a form at once symphonic and subtly hypnotic.” But neither gentleman remarks that the story is for the most part as easy to understand as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and is as lively as one of Simenon’s best. Nor does the passing reference to humor indicate that this element is an integral part of almost all of Biely’s work; an element so conspicuous that Prince Mirsky could call him “perhaps the greatest Russian humorist since Gogol.” And it should be noted that this same humor makes it difficult to understand how Mr. Cournos can find “a motif of terror” in the novel.

The bare bones of the plot do, indeed, compose a sufficiently terrifying skeleton. A son who has foolishly pledged himself to carry out the orders of a revolutionary group is given a bomb with which to kill his father, a senator and the head of a nameless but important Department. But Nikolai Ableukov is no terrorist, not even a genuine revolutionary; he is a foolish, idle young man who has emerged from the mists of German metaphysics to toy with Nihilism, and when he roams the Petersburg streets in his red domino, symbol of the spirit that flamed through the crust of Russian society in 1905, he is very nearly a buffoon.

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Ben Ray Redman

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George Reavey in his foreword to this edition calls St. Petersburg a novel “conceived on many levels and deliberately constructed to produce an impression of chaos and nightmare,” while John Cournos, the translator, informs us that it is “a vast fantasy, at times like a nightmare, realistically constituted as it is for the most part of the stuff of daily life, yet all of it built up like a piece of music, with a motif of terror, oddly mixed with humor, running through and holding the diverse fragments together in a form at once symphonic and subtly hypnotic.” But neither gentleman remarks that the story is for the most part as easy to understand as Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and is as lively as one of Simenon’s best. Nor does the passing reference to humor indicate that this element is an integral part of almost all of Biely’s work; an element so conspicuous that Prince Mirsky could call him “perhaps the greatest Russian humorist since Gogol.” And it should be noted that this same humor makes it difficult to understand how Mr. Cournos can find “a motif of terror” in the novel.

The bare bones of the plot do, indeed, compose a sufficiently terrifying skeleton. A son who has foolishly pledged himself to carry out the orders of a revolutionary group is given a bomb with which to kill his father, a senator and the head of a nameless but important Department. But Nikolai Ableukov is no terrorist, not even a genuine revolutionary; he is a foolish, idle young man who has emerged from the mists of German metaphysics to toy with Nihilism, and when he roams the Petersburg streets in his red domino, symbol of the spirit that flamed through the crust of Russian society in 1905, he is very nearly a buffoon.