Petersburg

"Petersburg" occupies approximately the same place in Russian prose as "Ulysses" by Joyce does in English and "The Trial" by Kafka does in German. The demonstratively classicist form hides an astonishing turbulence of content: Gogolian motifs intertwine with references to... Dostoevsky, while irony and social satire coexist with mysticism. A day and a half in the life of Petersburg official Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov and his son Nikolai becomes a strange, funny, and captivating phantasmagoria, where everything that characterized Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century is mixed into a strong cocktail — esotericism and occultism of various kinds, rallies and political terrorism, balls, masquerades, and even a fashion for satanism and suicides…