Petersburg is a story of family dysfunction, parricide, political terror, conspiracy and murder, but it also points to apocalypse and redemption. The world of history — the revolution of 1905 — and the world of myth — in the figure of Saturn, who devours his children and in turn is devoured by them-are intertwined. Russia is torn apart by the conflict between revolutions and reaction, at the level of myth, these opposites are indistinguishable. The Ableukhovs, father and son, embody this conflict, but are scions of the same Mongol lineage. The city itself if the child of its autocratic founder, Peter the Great, who maintains his power over it through the agency of his statue, the Bronze Horseman.
