The theme of "Petersburg" by Andrei Bely grew out of the bicentennial mythology of St. Petersburg, the beginning of the creation of which dates back to the laying of the city. The form of his work is unusual. It's a form of constant searching. Bely's prose is that of the orator, that of Demosthenes. The abridged Berlin edition of Petersburg in 1922 - a monument of a different historical time - is more connected with the style and nature of A. Bely's work of the 1920s than with his searches for the pre-revolutionary decade, when the idea of ​ ​ the work was hatched. Based on these considerations, the editorial board of Literary Monuments considered it expedient to reprint not an abridged, but the full text of the novel Petersburg in its original printed edition 1913-1914.