The boldest Russian novel of the 20th century was published for the first time in 2001 in its unabridged original version in German: Andrei Bely's Petersburg tells of an assassination plot being prepared in Petersburg in 1905, on the eve of the revolution. Vladimir Nabokov counted this novel—alongside Joyce's Ulysses and Kafka's Metamorphosis—among the three greatest masterpieces of prose literature of the 20th century, and even for today's critics, it is a "milestone of the modern novel," which only reveals its full power in this "congenial" translation by Gabriele Leupold. Andrei Bely (1880-1934) is regarded as the most significant prose author of Russian Symbolism. Petersburg was first published in 1913/14.