"... 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, Buñuel -- better get hold of Bely. He came first, and he's still the best." -- Washington Post Book World

"... a jewel-cutter's showcase." -- Kirkus Reviews

"... the most important, most influential and most perfectly realized Russian novel written in the 20th century." -- Simon Karlinsky

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 À la recherche du temps perdu as one of the four great works of prose fiction of the twentieth century.

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When one great author engages another, as Andrei Bely so brilliantly does in "Gogol's Artistry", the result is inevitably a telling portrait of both writers. So it is in "Gogol's Artistry". Translated into English for the first time, this idiosyncratic, exhaustive critical study is as interesting for what it tells us about Bely's thought and method as it is for its insights into the oeuvre of his literary predecessor. Bely's argument in this book is that Gogol's earlier writing should be given more consideration than most critics have granted. Employing what might be called a scientific perspective, Bely considers how often certain colors appear; he diagrams sentences and discusses Gogol's prose in terms of mathematical equations. The result, as strange and engaging as Bely's best fiction, is also an innovative, thorough, and remarkably revealing work of criticism....