wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Our second Underappreciated segment of the summer is on Andrei Bely's Symbolist novel Petersburg, which Vladimir Nabokov ranked as one of the top four novels of the 20th century, along with Franz Kafa's Metamorphosis, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and James Joyce's Ulysses, to which it is often compared. John Elsworth, Professor Emeritus in the Russian Studies Department at the University of Manchester, is the translator of the most recent edition (2009) of the novel. He'll explain why the novel is often overlooked.