TEHRAN – Saless Publications in Tehran will organize a session on Wednesday to review the Persian version of Russian writer Andrei Bely’s novel “Petersburg”. 

Translator Eftekhar Nabavinejad and literati Mahnaz Sadri, Bijan Ashtari and Mehdi Yazdanikhorram are scheduled to attend the review session. 

Written in 1913, the symbolic novel follows Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, a young revolutionary during the Russian Revolution of 1905 who has been ordered to assassinate his own father, Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov, a high Tsarist official, by planting a time bomb.

Instead of focusing on the immense task he has agreed to undertake, Nikolai Apollonovich attends parties and gets himself into the newspaper’s gossip columns with his antics. His father notices these exploits and decides that his son is a scoundrel. Eventually, Nikolai Apollonovich experiences a change of heart about his mission and throws the bomb into a river.

“Petersburg” is considered Bely’s masterpiece, although it received little attention when it was published and was not translated into English until 1959 by American-Russian translator John Cournos over 45 years after it was written.

Prominent Russian author Vladimir Nabokov ranked the book one of the four greatest masterpieces of the twentieth century after “Ulysses” and “The Metamorphosis” and before “In Search of Lost Time”.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian version of Russian author Andrei Bely’s novel “Petersburg”.

ABU/MMS/YAW