After enlisting in a revolutionary terrorist organization, the university student Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is entrusted with a highly dangerous mission: to plant a bomb and assassinate a major government figure. But the real central character of the novel is the city of Petersburg at the begin[...]

An unabridged translation of Bely's masterful, comic fiction of reactionary officials, nihilistic revolutionaries, a would-be parricide, a bomb concealed in a sardine can, and the city which as setting and character focuses the Russian search for national identity[...]