Petersburg

Set during the revolutionary upheaval of October 1905, the novel unfolds across several fraught days in St. Petersburg, the Russian imperial capital whose rectilinear prospects and fog-shrouded bridges embody a tension between claimed European order and precarious, possibly illusory, existence. The narrative centers on the Ableukhov family: Apollon Apollonovich, a powerful but aging senator; his estranged wife, Anna Petrovna; and their son, Nikolai Apollonovich, a young philosophy student entangled in a terrorist conspiracy. The city itself functions as a character, its geometry and bronze monuments shaping the fates of everyone who moves through it.

Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is a 68-year-old bureaucrat whose family traces its lineage, half-fancifully, to the Kirghiz-Kaisak Horde of Central Asia. He heads an unnamed Government Institution and is devoted to geometric symmetry: his household shelves are labeled with Latin letters and compass directions, and his rides through the city in a lacquered black carriage bring him comfort because the prospects form cubes and parallel lines. His wife left him two and a half years earlier for an Italian singer, and his relationship with Nikolai has calcified into stiff philosophical sparring at the dinner table. The house on the Neva Embankment is cold and silent, the piano lid closed since Anna Petrovna's departure.

The novel's central plot involves a bomb concealed in a sardine tin. Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, a gaunt revolutionary who lives in a garret on Vasilievsky Island, delivers a bundle wrapped in a napkin to the Ableukhov house on the instructions of Lippanchenko, a fat, yellow-faced man who manipulates the revolutionary Party and everyone around him. Dudkin presents the bundle to Nikolai for "safekeeping." Nikolai accepts it out of obligation: months earlier, driven to despair by an unhappy infatuation with Sofia Petrovna Likhutina, the wife of Second Lieutenant Sergei Sergeyevich Likhutin, Nikolai made a reckless promise to the revolutionary organization to commit an act of political violence. The promise was never retracted and has now been twisted into a directive to assassinate his own father with the bomb.

Parallel to the bomb plot runs the story of the red domino. Nikolai has been appearing around the city in a blood-red satin costume and a black lace-bearded mask, haunting bridges and streets near Sofia Petrovna's apartment. These appearances generate sensational newspaper stories and public alarm. Sofia herself provoked the rupture between them: infatuated with Nikolai since her own wedding, where he served as best man, she tormented him with flirtation and rejection until he tried to embrace her, at which point she slapped him and called him a "red buffoon." At the Tsukatov ball, events converge. Sofia, dressed as Madame Pompadour, dances with the masked Nikolai and slips him a letter she was asked to deliver, written in Lippanchenko's handwriting. The letter orders Nikolai to carry out the assassination using the bomb already in his possession. When Nikolai reads it, he flees the ballroom in full view of the guests, his mask raised, his identity exposed.

At the same ball, a mangy informer named Morkovin whispers to Apollon Apollonovich that the red domino is his own son. Later that night, Morkovin accosts Nikolai and presents him with three choices: arrest, suicide, or carrying out the murder. At the foot of the Bronze Horseman, the equestrian statue of Peter the Great, Nikolai feels the metallic figure pronouncing doom upon him.

Back home, Nikolai opens the bundle and finds the sardine tin with its clock mechanism. In a moment of trembling compulsion, he turns the small metal key, setting the bomb to detonate within 24 hours. He falls asleep over the tin and enters a dream of cosmic scope, in which Apollon Apollonovich appears as Saturn, an ancient Turanian, a Central Asian ancestral figure presiding over incarnations that telescope backward through history. Nikolai realizes he himself is a bomb, and he bursts. Waking, he frantically turns the key again, delaying the detonation, but he knows that when the coming night wanes, nothing will prevent the explosion.

Meanwhile, Sofia Petrovna's husband, Likhutin, has been driven to extremity. After Sofia defied his order not to attend the ball, the officer attempted to hang himself in their apartment, but the rotten ceiling gave way and he crashed to the floor. When Sofia returns, they reconcile in the rosy dawn light.

The next day, Nikolai and Dudkin meet on the street and discover that neither the assassination demand nor the identity of the "Unknown One" who signed the letters originated within the Party. Both suspect Lippanchenko. When Dudkin travels to Lippanchenko's seaside cottage to investigate, Lippanchenko admits he wrote the letter but counterattacks, accusing Dudkin of consorting with police agents and threatening to expose him. Dudkin accepts a tacit bargain, then recognizes the truth: Lippanchenko has enslaved his will. That night, supernatural visitations descend upon Dudkin's garret. The Bronze Horseman himself enters, sits in a chair, and pours into Dudkin's veins "in metals" (223).

Likhutin, having learned about the bomb from Sofia, tracks Nikolai down and drags him to the Likhutin apartment for a violent confrontation. He demands to search Nikolai's room and warn the senator. Nikolai protests his innocence, and the encounter ends in exhausted mutual bewilderment, with Likhutin offering to sew Nikolai's torn frock coat.

As these events unfold, Apollon Apollonovich's political career collapses amid the general strike. Yet domestic restoration arrives: he visits Anna Petrovna at her modest hotel room, and something tender passes between them. He brings her home. Nikolai, seeing his mother for the first time in years, falls weeping at her knees. A family dinner follows, and afterward father and son walk together through the darkened hall as Apollon Apollonovich speaks in a confiding manner and asks for greater openness.

Nikolai rushes to dispose of the bomb but finds the sardine tin gone from his desk. In fact, Apollon Apollonovich, during an abstracted wandering through his son's rooms, mechanically carried the tin to his own study without any awareness of its contents.

At Lippanchenko's cottage, Dudkin, possessed by the metallic force that flowed into his veins, murders Lippanchenko with a pair of scissors. In the morning, Dudkin is found straddling the corpse, arm extended, parodying the pose of the Bronze Horseman.

That night, the bomb detonates in Apollon Apollonovich's study. Nikolai finds his father on the bed, naked legs pressed to his chest, bawling in terror. When Nikolai approaches, the old man bolts down the corridor in his undershirt and locks himself in the water closet. Nikolai collapses at the door. The fire is extinguished, important connections are brought into play, and the affair is suppressed. No one is arrested.

Apollon Apollonovich retires to the country estate and arranges for Nikolai to travel abroad. Anna Petrovna accompanies her son out of Russia. The Epilogue traces years and continents. Nikolai lives near Tunis, then studies Egyptology in Egypt, seeing himself as "the summit of a culture which will crash into ruins" (307). Apollon Apollonovich, paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, pens witty memoirs that become famous across Russia, then dies. In 1913, Nikolai lives alone on the family estate, bearded and silver-locked, wearing a peasant coat. He reads the Ukrainian mystic philosopher Skovoroda. He is seen in church. His parents have died.