Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg

The first stop will be made for inspection of the place of study of the future writer in the Nikolaev Engineering school, once located in the Mikhailovsky castle. Here the emperor Paul I was tragically murdered. Many believe that the senior cadets, whom Feodor Dostoevsky belonged to, came up with the story of the emperor’s ghost to intimidate newly arrived students. Dostoevsky entered the engineering school at the insistence of his father. While studying Dostoevsky independently received an excellent education in the humanities and began work on his first creations, dramas “Boris Godunov” and “Mary Stuart”, which were never completed.

On Vladimirsky prospect you will see the house were the novel “Poor people” was created. This place is connected with the tragic event in the life of the writer: here, in a rented apartment, he was arrested because of being a part of so-called “freethinkers” society. After being taken into custody, he was imprisoned for eight months in the Peter and Paul fortress also known as the “Russian Bastille” in those years. Despite the prison hardships, he was able to write a story “A little hero” there.

We will show you the former Semenovsky platz (a Pioneer square nowadays). Dostoevsky was sentenced to death here, but the execution was replaced with an exile at the last minute. Later it became known that the whole thing was a hoax performed to break the spirit of the representatives of the progressive intelligentsia.

Our guide will take you to the places associated with the world famous “Crime and punishment” novel. You will find out in which house Rodion Raskolnikov lived and what route to the old lender woman he went with a death sentence.

“His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open”.

You will walk through Sadovaya and Gorokhovaya streets, visit Sennaya square and Stolarny alley. The old city area, “soaked with a sense of despair for the common man”, where the main action of the novel unfolds, will appear before your eyes.

“It was about nine o’clock when he crossed the Hay Market. At the tables and the barrows, at the booths and the shops, all the market people were closing their establishments or clearing away and packing up their wares and, like their customers, were going home. Rag pickers and costermongers of all kinds were crowding round the taverns in the dirty and stinking courtyards of the Hay Market. Raskolnikov particularly liked this place and the neighboring alleys, when he wandered aimlessly in the streets”.

Another destination of the tour is the apartment of Dostoevsky in Kuznechny lane, where he wrote “Karamazov Brothers “. In 1971 a memorial museum was opened here. It so happened that the writer lived here twice: at the beginning of his writing career and at the end of his life.  In the apartment-museum you will see the collection of personal belongings of Dostoevsky and two exhibitions – one devoted the writer’s life and the other devoted to his literary activities.

The exhibits for the museum were collected literally bit by bit. The study room of Fyodor Mikhailovich has been recreated according to the memoirs of contemporaries and extant photographs. Thanks to historical records, the museum stuff was able to fully recreate the apartment down to the smallest details which include the medication box on the writer’s table and the Mother of God icon in the corner of his room.