Thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if humdrum life as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and loses his job. This change of status brings him into contact with a number of women-the titular "sisters of the cross"-whose sufferings will lead him to question the ultimate meaning of the universe. The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei Remizov, one of the most influential members of the Russian Symbolist movement, Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction. In the tradition of Gogol's Petersburg Tales and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, it deploys densely packed psychological prose and fluctuating narrative perspective to tell the story of a "poor clerk" who rebels against the suffering and humiliation afflicting both his own life and the lives of the remarkable women whom he encounters in the tenement building where he lives in Petersburg. The novel reaches its haunting climax at the beginning of the Whitsuntide festival, when Marakulin thinks he glimpses the coming of salvation both for himself and for the "fallen" actress Verochka, the unacknowledged love of his life, in one of the most powerfully drawn scenes in Symbolist literature. Remizov is best known as a writer of short stories and fairy tales, but this early novel, masterfully translated by Roger Keys and Brian Murphy, is perhaps his most significant work of sustained artistic prose.

Thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if humdrum life as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and loses his job. This change of status brings him into contact with a number of women-the titular "sisters of the cross"-whose sufferings will lead him to question the ultimate meaning of the universe. The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei Remizov, one of the most influential members of the Russian Symbolist movement, Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction. In the tradition of Gogol's Petersburg Tales and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, it deploys densely packed psychological prose and fluctuating narrative perspective to tell the story of a "poor clerk" who rebels against the suffering and humiliation afflicting both his own life and the lives of the remarkable women whom he encounters in the tenement building where he lives in Petersburg. The novel reaches its haunting climax at the beginning of the Whitsuntide festival, when Marakulin thinks he glimpses the coming of salvation both for himself and for the "fallen" actress Verochka, the unacknowledged love of his life, in one of the most powerfully drawn scenes in Symbolist literature. Remizov is best known as a writer of short stories and fairy tales, but this early novel, masterfully translated by Roger Keys and Brian Murphy, is perhaps his most significant work of sustained artistic prose.

Andrei Belyi (1880-1934) is generally regarded as the greatest and most influential prose-writer to emerge from the Symbolist movement in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. His early prose `symphonies' and novels are often compared with the work of such European `modernists' as Joyce and Proust. This is the first book to attempt a systematic analysis of the place of Belyi's fiction within the modernist prose tradition in Russia; a tradition which has been obscured by decades of ideological distortion. Paradoxically, Belyi himself, a mystic by nature who sought only transcendent certainty from the flux of experience, would have been reluctant to claim this tradition as his own. Keys demonstrates the inadequacy of the various `isms' (Symbolism, Impressionism, etc.) which have until recently bedevilled most critical attempts to sort out the prose of the period, giving a comprehensive overview of Belyi criticism from both within and outside the Soviet Union. The book includes a detailed analysis of Belyi's prose works, paying keen attention to his philosophical and literary influences, including extensive reading of Kant and Gogol and its particular effect upon his theory and practice, and locating him firmly in his own Russian context. Sections devoted to Belyi's greatest novel, Petersburg, and other works, such as The Silver Dove and Dramatic Symphony, analyse Belyi's use of structure and plot, leitmotifs and acoustic symbolism. The book marks Belyi's attempts to reconcile the Symbolist vision of the writer as having revelatory mystical authority with the concept of `perspectivism', implied author, narrator and character offering a number of different voices which cannot claim cognitive authority beyond the fictional context in which they occur.