Petersburg (, Peterbúrg) is a novel by Russian writer Andrei Bely. A Symbolist work, it has been compared to other "city novels" like Ulysses and Berlin Alexanderplatz. The first edition was completed in November 1913 and published serially from October 1913 to March 1914 (and later reissued as a book in 1916). It received little attention and was not translated into English until 1959 by John Cournos, over 45 years after it was written. Today the book is generally considered Bely's masterpiece; Vladimir Nabokov ranked it one of the four greatest "masterpieces of twentieth century prose", after Ulysses and The Metamorphosis, and before "the first half" of In Search of Lost Time. In 1922 Bely published in Berlin a revised edition which was shorter by a third than the first one. As Bely noted, "the new edition is a completely new book for the readers of the first edition". In the Berlin version Bely changed the foot of his rhythmic prose from anapest to amphibrach, and removed ironical passages related to the revolutionary movement. The second version is usually considered as inferior to the first one. The novel is the second part of Bely's unfinished trilogy East or West, while The Silver Dove is the first one. Plot summary Just after the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is given the task of assassinating his bureaucrat father, Apollon Apollonovich, using a time bomb supplied to him by a fellow radical, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin. Nikolai Apollonovich spends much of his time dressing himself in a red domino costume with a black domino mask, making a fool of himself in front of Sofya Petrovna Likhutina, a woman who has rebuked his flirtations in the past. Instead of focusing on the immense task he has agreed to undertake he gets himself into the newspaper's gossip columns with his antics and attends a party. His father notices these exploits and decides that his son is a scoundrel. Dudkin himself answers to a higher power, a man named Lippanchenko who is the leader of their radical group. Eventually both Nikolai Apollonovich and Dudkin experience a change of heart about their mission, however there is much to detain Nikolai Apollonovich on his way to throw the bomb into the river. Characters Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov - a senior official in the Russian Imperial government Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov (Nikolenka/Kolenka) - Apollon Apollonovich's son; a