As Timothy Langen explains, it shaped Bely’s thought in the decade preceding his Petersburg project, and it is present there as one of the novel’s competing philosophies. Neo-Kantianism is yet another philosophical current informing the novel. The formative role in modernist philosophies of art and life of Nietzsche’s intellectual heritage all but assured that Bely would engage with it in Petersburg, as Edith Clowes illustrates. Bely’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche’s iconoclastic thought predated his work on the novel. Maria Carlson draws attention to Bely’s fascination with Theosophy and with its offshoot-Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophical doctrine, which freshly captivated the writer midway through his work on Petersburg.

Lynn Patyk elucidates the historical circumstances informing Petersburg’s terrorist intrigue, with an eye on the range of meanings that intrigue had in Bely’s modernist circle and in contemporary Russian society at large.

The first part treats Petersburg’s rapports with Russian and European intellectual life in Bely’s day.

Fortunately, Livak has posted a summary of the book’s contents, from which I will quote: Leo Livak, one of the great scholars of Russian modernism, promised me he’d have University of Wisconsin Press send me a copy of the new book he’s edited, A Reader’s Guide to Andrei Bely’s Petersburg it’s arrived, and it’s even better than I expected.

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