I read this book in my youth and loved it then. Revisiting it hasn't diminished the richness of its style or the quality of its impact. I love it still. Taras Bulba captures the wildness of spirit of the Cossacks and their role in the early Russia. It shows the magnificence of the qualities of love, loyalty and bravery. It also shows the opposite side of the human psyche mainly cruelty and despair in the face of overwhelming force.

There are always two values in Russian literature and music a high booming note and a low resonating note. This triumph of Gogol exhibits both in true Russian style. In a way this illuminates the components of Russian character.

It is by no means easy critiquing a work by the great Gogol but to advise readers to sample this great work I feel is a duty and a privilege.

By all means read this book, it goes to the heart of the Cossack and Russian soul. It will answer the basic question about the Russian people's love of motherland which has echoed throughout Russian history.

...tick tick tick.....this is Turgenev's Fathers and Sons written after the modernist floodgates had been opened. My version of this has a Kandinsky on the cover and that is the perfect emblem to front this Russian avante garde revolution of a book. There is in it a live time bomb waiting to go off. It takes awhile to get used to Biely's unusual way with words(and I have no idea if this is a translation thing or not) but once you catch his rhythms it is a great read. We live in a much more settled civilization than the one this author experienced and documents but if you like to read things that remind you that culture occasionally does undergo monumental shifts, this is one of those works. Not perfection to our postmodernist ears but strange music indeed. Boom.

It was Vladimir Nabokov's opinion that this novel is "One of the four great masterpieces of twentieth-century prose," in company with The Metamorphosis, Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past. Andrey Bely (or Biely, I've found it spelled both ways) was the pen name of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev. He was a leading figure of the Symbolist movement in pre-Revolutionary Russia and, in addition to Nabokov, influenced Boris Pasternak and Yevgeny Zamyatin, among others. St. Petersburg is certainly as innovative as the other works Nabokov ranks it with, using characters and even geography as allegorical symbols for ideas, and written in a nearly stream-of-consciousness prose. But to my very pleasant surprise, it is much more enjoyable than these other touchstones of Modernism.

The action of the novel, and happily there is some action, occurs over the course of two days in 1905, when Russia, having lost the War with Japan, was wracked by strikes, conspiracy, violence and near revolution. Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov is an elderly, but still devoted, Tsarist bureaucrat. His dilettantish son, Nikolai, who is dabbling in radical politics, has been given the task of murdering his own father; the chosen weapon, improbably enough, a bomb in a sardine tin. Just as the city of St. Petersburg--Peter the Great's "window on the West"--represents the point where the rational West meets the savage and mystical Orient, so this confrontation between father and son represents impending conflict between European reason and Asiatic barbarism, and the bomb itself represents the indiscriminately destructive forces about to be brought to bear on the decaying Tsarist state.

Though much of the story, inevitably in this type of modernist fiction, is obscure and barely coherent, the literally ticking time bomb gives the story a propulsive forward momentum which speeds the reader along and, though I'm certain I missed much of the symbolism, because the imagined clash between the main symbols proved eerily prophetic, we can read things into the story that Biely probably never intended. Biely's use of language and symbolism lends an almost feverish quality to the narrative, as if the whole thing were a particularly horrible dream. It is a story suffused with a sense of dread and with intimations of the chaos to come, both in the novel and in the society it depicts.

I don't know that it necessarily deserves quite the elevated position that Nabokov gave it, but it was apparently extremely influential on Russian Literature and it makes for an unusual but gratifying reading experience. You'll surely enjoy it more than you would the almost unreadable James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

GRADE : B

10 15 99

According to a review in Smithsonian, March 1987, by Michael Dirda, Nabokov called Biely's St. Petersburg the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century.

I came to Ezra Jack Keats' _Peter's Chair_ with high expectations. My two-year old and I both love his other books, like Goggles, A Letter To Amy, and Whistle for Willie.

_Peter's Chair_ is something of a disappointment. Drawn in the same style as his other titles, it's the story of Peter, who becomes an older brother for the first time. He rebels when he finds out that all his baby things are being reassigned to the baby girl, and given a fresh coat of PINK paint. Eventually he comes to accept that he's got to share the spotlight, and all is well.

When a younger sibling is born, it's nearly always a struggle for the older child to learn to share the parental attention. This is a common issue dealt with in children's books. Sad to say, it isn't dealt with very well in this book. _Peter's Chair_ just isn't a very good story, and children of the 1990s and later, who can't see that PINK MUST EQUAL GIRL and BLUE MUST EQUAL BOY are going to be confused by this implication.

Please, go look at the author's other titles: Goggles, A Letter To Amy, and Whistle for Willie, among others. They are most wonderful books by Ezra Jack Keats. Sad to say, I can only give _Peter's Chair_ 3 stars.

ken32

I have 2 boys in 1st grade with little sisters. This book reflects the struggle that they go through in sharing things with younger siblings.

I teach children ages3-5 and one day I went to the library to get some books for them PETER'S CHAIR was among the selection it also came with the tape so when I wasn't able to read to the children I would put hte tape on for them. The children requested the book everyday up until the day I had dto take it back,there was one child in particular who would come up to me and say Ms.Tracey could you read Peter's Chair to me so I would sit her on my lap and read it just to her and than one day she came to me and said can I read Peter's Chair to you Ms.Tracey, and so in her own words and with expression she read Peter's Chair it did my heart good that she (KEISHA)had started her love for books. Thanks to Ezra Jack Keats you've made a difference in a child's life.