Petersburg or St. Petersburg (1913, revised 1922) is the title of Andrei Bely's masterpiece, a Symbolist work that foreshadows Joyce's Modernist ambitions. For various reasons the novel never received the attention it deserved and was only translated into English for the first time in 1959 by John Cournos, over 45 years after it was written and when Joyce was already established as an important writer.
The novel is based in Saint Petersburg and follows a revolutionary who has been hired to assassinate his own father, a high Tsarist official; there are many similarities with Joyce's novel, such as the linguistic rhythms and wordplay, the Symbolist and subtle political concerns which structure the themes of the novel, the importance of the respective capital cities and city life as a setting for the novel, and that the main protagonist in both is Jewish (Joyce and Bely were not Jewish), although the differences are also notable: Bely remains partly more accessible and, according to scholarly opinion, the range of his innovations is smaller.
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There have been three major translations of the novel into English:
St. Petersburg or Saint Petersburg, translated by John Cournos (1959)
Petersburg, translated and annotated by John E. Malmstad and Robert A. Maguire (1978) (paperback: ISBN 0253202191)
This novel was taken coldly by the public as well as his other eight stories printed in 1846-48.
Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg in 1854 as a writer with a religious mission and published two works that derive in different ways from his Siberia experiences: The Notes from the Dead House, a fictional account of prison life, and The Insulted and Injured, which reflects the author's refutation of naive Utopianism.
The novel is constructed around a simple plot, dealing with the murder of the father of the Karamazov family by his illegitimate son, Smerdiakov.
Petersburg ceased being the capital when the capital was moved to Moscow after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
The public monuments of St Petersburg also include Mikeshin's circular statue of Catherine II on the Nevsky Avenue, fine horse statues on the Anichkov Bridge, a Rodin-like equestrian statue of Alexander III by Paolo Troubetzkoy, and the Tercentenary monument presented by France in 2003 and installed on the Sennaya Square.
The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was born in St. Petersburg, dedicated his Seventh Symphony to the city, calling it the "Leningrad Symphony."?title=He wrote the symphony during the German siege of the city in 1941.
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