Poetry and Psychiatry

In this volume, Professor Ljunggren introduces the Symbolists and their feverish expectations in detail. Theirs was a time when for a brief moment everything seemed possible. Then came the rude awakening, best described in Bely''s powerful prose masterpiece ''Petersburg,'' which serves as the connective thread and recurrent point of reference throughout this collection. Written in the early1910s, just before the world war that was to culminate in the so-called October Revolution, Bely''s novel portrays the collective experience of the Symbolists as an attempted political parricide.