Disintegration of the Atom and Petersburg Winters

Petersburg Winters (1928), a portrait of Petersburg drowning in the artistic ferment of late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. Georgy Ivanov is the fictional narrator of this tragic and artistically glorious period 1910-1925. Ivanov’s memoir is controversial, part of the so-called Petersburg text , of Russian literature. The spirit of the city is conveyed through a series of vignettes of contemporary writers such as Blok, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam. Disintegration of the Atom (1937) is a prose poem depicting Russian despair in Paris on the eve of WWII. A cri de coeur that challenges our concepts of time and space and leads to erotically charged wretchedness. This exciting collection is suitable for courses on early twentieth century literary memoir and cultural history.