This volume consists of ten essays by scholars from the Soviet Union, the United States and New Zealand on aspects of Russian literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the exception of Gorky, all the authors considered belong to one or another branch of the Modernist movement. They include Ivan Konevskoi, who died tragically young in 1901, the poets Maksimilian Voloshin, Viacheslav Ivanov and Benedikt Livshits, and the prose writers Fedor Sologub, Andrei Belyi and Evgenii Zamiatin.

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 beginning of the twentieth century, caught in the grip of political agitation and social unrest. Intertwining the worlds of history and myth, and parading a cast of unforgettable characters, Petersburg is a story of apocalypse and redemption played out through family dysfunction, conspiracy and murder.