Andrei Bely (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) is one of the key figures of the Silver Age, an original and influential symbolist, the creator of perfect and unsurpassed-sounding poetry and the author of original “ornamental” prose, the highest achievement of which was the novel “Petersburg”, called by contemporaries not prose, but “destroyed by the elements.” According to D.S. Likhachev, St. Petersburg in the novel is “not between East and West, but East and West at the same time, i.e. the whole world. This is how Bely poses the problem of Russia for the first time in Russian literature.” In addition to “Petersburg,” the book includes poems by A. Bely from the collections “Gold in Azure,” “Ashes,” and the poem “First Date.”