Petersburg. Poems

Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolayevich Bugaev) is one of the key figures of the Silver Age—a distinctive and influential symbolist, creator of perfect, unsurpassed-sounding poetry, and author of original “ornamental” prose, whose highest achievement became the novel “Petersburg,” which contemporaries called not prose but a “dissolved element.”

According to D. S. Likhachev, “in the novel, Petersburg is not ‘between East and West,’ but ‘East and West at once, that is, the whole world. Thus, White posed the problem of Russia for the first time in Russian literature.’”

Besides “Petersburg,” the book includes Andrei Bely’s poems from the collections “Gold in Azure,” “Ash,” and the poem “First Meeting.”