Petersburg by Andrei Bely

Published 1913 · 191,780 words · about 31 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction

How hard is Petersburg to read?

Petersburg scores 85 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 85 out of 100
Bely deploys archaic and elevated vocabulary throughout — 'expatiate,' 'prolixity,' 'obsequiousness,' 'appurtenances,' 'redolent' — alongside bureaucratic and philosophical jargon drawn from Kantian metaphysics and Russian Imperial administration. He also invents nonsense words like 'enfranshish,' used by the revolutionary Dudkin during hallucinations. The lexical demands exceed Gravity's Rainbow (80) but fall short of Ulysses's multilingual portmanteau density (95).
Sentence structure: 80 out of 100
Sentences frequently run for many lines with multiple embedded clauses, parenthetical asides, and sudden mid-sentence shifts in perspective or register. The Prologue sustains an extended mock-official voice through recursive tautology ('Nevskii Prospect is a Prospect because it is a Prospect'). These Proustian subordinations (approaching 78) are pushed further by the narrator's habit of interrupting his own constructions with editorial digressions, though he avoids the unpunctuated extremes of Ulysses (98).
Abstraction: 82 out of 100
The novel repeatedly dissolves concrete reality into philosophical and geometric abstraction: Apollon Apollonovich experiences the city as a system of intersecting Prospects raised to the power of n; Dudkin describes his soul as 'outer space'; the narrator posits that characters exist only as products of 'cerebral play.' These sustained metaphysical digressions push beyond Gravity's Rainbow (80), though the underlying political thriller plot provides more concrete grounding than Waiting for Godot (85).
Information density: 85 out of 100
Every passage carries multiple simultaneous registers: historical (1905 Revolution), literary-allusive (Pushkin epigraphs, the Bronze Horseman myth, Gogol's Petersburg tales), philosophical (Kantian idealism, Nietzsche), and symbolist. Scene-setting paragraphs double as meditations on consciousness and empire. The density approaches Ulysses (90) but the political thriller scaffolding keeps individual scenes more parseable than Joyce's encyclopedic layering.
Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100
The narrator openly questions whether Petersburg 'merely seems to exist,' and characters are repeatedly described as products of other characters' 'cerebral play' — the revolutionary Dudkin literally emerges, in one passage, from the senator's thoughts. Readers must constantly adjudicate between what is happening in the external plot and what is hallucination, authorial invention, or philosophical provocation. This exceeds Pedro Paramo (85) in its systematic ontological instability.
Symbolic density: 90 out of 100
Virtually nothing in the novel operates purely on a literal level. Geometric forms (cubes, parallelepipeds, the square) externalize the senator's psychology and Russia's bureaucratic will-to-order. The Bronze Horseman haunts the narrative as an emblem of Petrine power and apocalyptic pursuit. The red domino, the bomb in the desk, the islands versus the mainland, the fog — all function as densely layered symbolic constructs. The saturation approaches Moby-Dick (90) in systematic mythologization of its central objects.
Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
Bely's narrator is relentlessly intrusive and self-mocking, parodying official language in the Prologue, interrupting scenes to note his own inaccuracies ('I must correct an error that has crept in'), and deploying sardonic bureaucratic pastiche to describe revolutionary terror. The gap between the novel's grandiose Imperial setting and its characters' petty, neurotic behavior is a source of sustained irony. Less systematically self-undermining than Ulysses (88) but more pervasive than the Dostoevskian framing of Brothers Karamazov (55).
Resolution withholding: 82 out of 100
The bomb plot resolves in a bathetic non-climax; the Ableukhov family estrangement is only partially addressed; Dudkin's identity crisis and 'certain person' remain philosophically unresolved. The novel's central question — whether Petersburg, Russia, and its characters truly exist or are phantoms — is never answered. This sustained refusal of closure exceeds Lolita (65) in ambiguity, falling between The Crying of Lot 49 (75) and Infinite Jest (88).
Structural complexity: 88 out of 100
The novel employs a metafictional narrator who breaks the fourth wall throughout, interrogates his own narrative construction, and embeds multiple embedded stories (the bomb plot, the family drama, Dudkin's revolutionary history). Dream sequences and waking hallucinations bleed into each other without clear demarcation. Multiple simultaneous plotlines operate in different registers of reality. The experimental ambition approaches Ulysses (98) but the underlying chapter structure remains more conventional than Joyce's radical episode-by-episode reinvention of form.

How Petersburg is regarded

Petersburg holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Petersburg sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (378 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Petersburg scores 90 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Nikolai Apollonovich understood that he was only a bomb; and he burst with a bang
Symbol: Anagogic
Petersburg doesn’t have three dimensions, it has four
Mythos: Irony and Satire Phase 6 (visio malefica) (irony vi)
Genre: Anatomy + Novel
The Russian Empire is in the first place a geographical unit, which is to say: part of a certain planet.

Where the story of Petersburg takes place

  • St. Petersburg, 1905, the main setting
  • St Petersburg, September-October 1905
  • Tunis, Egypt and the Ableukhov country estate, 1906-1913 (1906 to 1913)

5 things that are true of Petersburg, with the passage for each

  1. The narrator announces in the opening pages that Petersburg may not exist at all.

    But if Petersburg is not the capital, then Petersburg does not exist. It merely seems to exist.

  2. Second Lieutenant Likhutin shaves off his moustache before trying to hang himself.

    And Sergei Sergeich shaved himself clean: and clean-shaven he looked an utter idiot.

  3. The bomb is disguised as a sardine-tin with a clockwork mechanism.

    Not just a sardine-tin, but a sardine-tin of terrible import!

  4. The Bronze Horseman climbs the stairs and enters Dudkin's attic as a visitor.

    It was—the Bronze Guest.

  5. The household servant answers the senator's riddle: a watermelon is a vegetable, not a berry.

    A watermelon, your Excellency, is by no means a berry—it is a vegetable.

Scenes in Petersburg that Frye would name

60 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, untitled
there was a pool of blood; and there was a corpse The sacrificial death of Lippanchenko, killed by Dudkin with the scissors.
Sparagmos, untitled
he realised that his back had been cut open: just the way you cut the white hairless skin of a cold sucking-pig in horseradish Lippanchenko's body is torn open, the novel's sparagmos in the flesh.
Hamartia, untitled
Nikolai Apollonovich had given the terrible undertaking out of nothing but despair The fatal misstep: a rash promise made by the bridge sets the plot in motion.
Hamartia, untitled
the key slowly turned to one hour, then it turned to two hours Nikolai fatally winds the bomb's mechanism instead of disposing of it.
Anagnorisis, untitled
Then all of a sudden a veil was torn open before Alexandr Ivanovich: he remembered everything distinctly Dudkin recalls the Helsingfors act and recognises that his persecutors are inside him.
Agon, untitled
And an angular body flew after the receding figure Likhutin hurls himself at Nikolai in a physical and psychic contest in the locked study.

Books that share these scenes with Petersburg

About the author

Andrei Bely