Time Bomb

ST. PETERSBURG (310 pp.)--Andrey Biely--Grove ($4.75).

There is nothing like a ticking time bomb to supply fictional suspense, and perhaps no writer has ever used the device more successfully than Andrey Biely in St. Petersburg, originally published in Russia in 1913 and now translated into English for the first time. Biely (real name: Boris Bugaiev) died in 1934, a political pariah; like Boris Pasternak, he was a Russian who came to see that revolution often destroys more than it creates.

The novel's hero is a young St. Petersburg philosophy student, Nikolai Apollonovich, who has got mixed up with a seedy revolutionary gang and has committed himself to planting a bomb. The trouble is that the target is his own father --an elderly, rich and humorless bureaucrat just below Cabinet rank and a champion of the Czarist regime. His much younger wife has left him; his son despises him, and most people fear him, actually, he is a harmless little man whose sole commitment is to the civil service. But it is 1905 and Russia has just taken a beating from Japan, factory workers are striking, and the bomb throwers know that their big chance has come.

As it happens, they have chosen the wrong man for the wrong job. Slight, timorous and flaxen-haired, young Nikolai has goaded himself to an inner state just this side of madness. But when the moment comes, he has neither courage nor hatred enough for his mission. What happens is a tragicomedy of errors--conspirators' notes gone astray, the bomb lost, crashing non sequiturs to a near surrealist plot.

Author Biely is a crafty storyteller who can keep a reader flipping the pages while whipping up an intellectual storm. As he describes St. Petersburg in 1905; it is a city where icy water licks morose granite foundations. In prose that seems jittery at first, then calculated, Biely moves from a fashionable masquerade ball to the roach-ridden headquarters of the revolutionary gang; he works the weather and the face of the chaotic city into his story so firmly that at last they seem as important and ominous as any character in the book. When the bomb finally goes off, it is not so much an exclamation point as a period to a narrative that has told all but judged nothing. Who is to say that the half-mad sad-sack hero really is different from the nihilist leader, or that the civil servant's allegiance is so far removed from the revolutionary's? Author Biely makes the reader work toward the answers.

St. Petersburg can be taken as a sharp, jittery account of an explosive moment in Russian history, as a symbol-laden probe of the Russian temperament, or as a condemnation of nihilism. As a story about tormented oddballs, it needs none of these assists, but they enrich a difficult book that rises above its difficulties.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.