Byzantium Endures is a novel by Michael Moorcock

Michael Moorcock

Michael John Moorcock is an English writer, primarily of science fiction and fantasy, who has also published a number of literary novels....

. It is the first in the Pyat Quartet

Pyat Quartet

Pyat Quartet is a tetralogy of novels by Michael Moorcock comprising Byzantium Endures, The Laughter of Carthage, Jerusalem Commands and The Vengeance of Rome....

 tetralogy

Tetralogy

A tetralogy is a compound work that is made up of four distinct works, just as a trilogy is made up of three works....

.

The book is written in the first person from the point of view of unreliable narrator

Unreliable narrator

An unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The term was coined in 1961 by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. This narrative mode is one that can be developed by an author for a number of reasons, usually...

 Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, whose posthumous notes Moorcock claims to have transcribed.

Pyat, as he is also known, describes in the novel his adventures in Tsarist then Revolutionary Russia. Born on 1 January 1900 in Kiev

Kiev

Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....

, Pyat dreams from early on to become a great inventor and engineer.

His widowed mother, lacking any means to support his higher education, sends him at age 16 to a relative in Odessa

Odessa

Odessa or Odesa is the administrative center of the Odessa Oblast located in southern Ukraine. The city is a major seaport located on the northwest shore of the Black Sea and the fourth largest city in Ukraine with a population of 1,029,000 .The predecessor of Odessa, a small Tatar settlement,...

, where Pyat is introduced to bohemian

Bohemian

A Bohemian is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word...

 life, cocaine

Cocaine

Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...

 and sexual adventures.

Making a good impression on his relative, he secures a position at a technical university in St. Petersburg

Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University

Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University is a major Russian technical university situated in Saint Petersburg. Previously it was known as the Peter the Great Polytechnical Institute and Kalinin Polytechnical Institute .-Imperial Russia:...

. After having failed to obtain a degree, he returns to Kiev, where he manages to profit from his knowledge of machinery and runs a successful repair enterprise.

The revolutionary

October Revolution

The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

 and post revolutionary civil war

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

 bring him again to Odessa; on the way, he aligns with whatever group is in power. Finally, he manages to escape by ship to western Europe.

Throughout all his wanderings, Pyat will not pass over any opportunity for self-aggrandisement, despite being a genuinely despicable character

Anti-hero

In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...

. The character appears to have been addicted to cocaine

Cocaine

Cocaine is a crystalline tropane alkaloid that is obtained from the leaves of the coca plant. The name comes from "coca" in addition to the alkaloid suffix -ine, forming cocaine. It is a stimulant of the central nervous system, an appetite suppressant, and a topical anesthetic...

 and sex

Sex

In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into a male or female variety . Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents...

. He is also obsessively antisemitic despite multiple hints that his father was Jewish.