Book Review : Petersburg by Andrei Bely

I think that anyone who is going to read this book should go through the introduction first and then decide whether they wish to read the book.

The plot of the book is about a Russian terror organisation who are planning to assassinate a high-ranking official with a bomb. This is 1905 and this is Petersburg.

The bomb is in a sardine can, the assassin will be Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, and the official is his father Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov. Yes, the plot of the book is about a plot to have a son assassinate his own father by throwing a tin of sardines at him.

The main reason for Andrei Bely writing this work is his own investigation into how language determines what the reader regards as real. Quite often people, places, and situations are described in more than one style, a mystic style and then a style of what action had just occurred or what a character had just done.

The prose contains many signs, phonemes that Bely uses to create his imaginary world and make it ‘real’ for the reader. The only problem is that the reader might not realise this and appreciate the book less as a result. The language is poetic in many places and the format changes often.

This is not an easy book to read.