Touring Dostoevsky's Dark St. Petersburg

ST. PETERSBURG -- Russian literature really did not exist until -- through a singular act of will, cruelty and imagination -- Peter the Great summoned St. Petersburg, this strange, beautiful city, from the sea. Somehow, by inventing a new city in an old country, Peter created for Russia not just a fortress but also a soul.


If they wished, visitors here could do nothing but wander among the marble busts and ornate villas of the literary past: Pushkin's vest -- pierced by the bullet that killed him in a useless duel -- lies permanently on display. Here Gogol wrote much of "Dead Souls,'' his uncanny guide to the mind of the Russian bureaucrat. There are, of course, shrines to Alexander Blok and to Osip Mandelstam, 20th-century Russia's greatest poet.


In a former palace that became a communal apartment under the Communists, the rooms of the city's muse, Anna Akhmatova, have been turned into a simple monument to her moody elegance.


But for all the literary echoes ringing through the grand, neoclassical mansions, for all the artifice and pageantry, St. Petersburg is still the dark province of one febrile man: Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although he was born in Moscow, he spent more than 30 years here, where he created his greatest novels. More than to any other writer, this city, at once so glorious and so malign, belongs to him.


"There is something inexpressibly touching,'' Dostoevsky wrote about the city in his story "White Nights.''


"She reminds me somehow rather forcibly of that girl, ailing and faded, upon whom you sometimes look with pity or with a certain compassionate affection, or whom you simply do not notice at all ... and, stunned and fascinated, you ask yourself what power it was that made those sad and wistful eyes blaze forth with such a fire?"


It was a series of questions that occupied him throughout his life.


Dostoevsky was the greatest interpreter of the limitless depths of the Russian soul, and this is the place where it has always been most clearly on display. He once declared that St. Petersburg was a city for the "half mad.'' Viscount Melchoir de Vogue, a Frenchman, agreed, and regarded Dostoevsky as its warden: "He is the Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum.''


Much has changed here since Dostoevsky died in 1881; much has even changed this year. (From the window of one of the many apartments in which he lived, Golden Arches are visible; from the doorstep of another dwelling you can spy offices for Fedex and Sprint.) It is sometimes hard to reconcile the mystical anti-Western view of the writer with a city that is now filled with boutiques; that has a Western hotel in a houseboat on the banks of the vast, roiling Neva River, and that has never been a coherent part of Russia.


In the end, even today, it doesn't matter. The writer's city, finally, cannot be budged. The grim layer of cloud and fog rising from the Neva guarantees that. The canals are as fetid and mysterious as they were 150 years ago. And the fact that St. Petersburg is so European and has always been so helps create the city's permanent sense of ambivalence, of not belonging. So it is still fun -- and instructive -- to stroll the streets of the imperial city, seeing how intricately Dostoevsky's work and life were meshed.


It is perhaps best to start where he ended up. Since 1971, the writer's last apartment has been a museum. There are two floors filled with paintings of everything from the French Revolution (which inspired him and many other St. Petersburg intellectuals) to likenesses of Christ. Collections both of his works and of the works he read -- most notably his Bible -- have also been retained. Historians tried without success to find the original plan for the apartment. So they improvised: they removed 18 layers of wallpaper until they found a green, ornately detailed paper dated 1878, a time when Dostoevsky occupied the apartment. Here he wrote his last novel, "The Brothers Karamazov.''


Two photographs were made of his original study, so it can be seen today as it was when he wrote. He kept his desk compulsively neat, but his writing style was intensely haphazard.


You can see manuscript copies where he fills a page, turns it over and fills the back and then scrawls additions in the margin. Two candles sit on his desk because he hated electric light and never used it when he wrote.


Dostoevsky moved 20 times in his three decades here, most of the time because he could no longer afford what he had. His gambling was ruinous to his health, his relationships and his pocketbook. But it kept him productive. He was often poor, usually in debt. But he was always particular about what kind of place would be suitable for him.


"When he rented an apartment he always looked for corner buildings,'' said Vera Biron, a Dostoevsky scholar who has written a Russian-language guide to the writer's city and who conducts tours for the Dostoevsky Museum.


"That way he could be more isolated from people. It was also important to him to live in a place with a church or a cathedral that could be seen from his house.''


We are standing at Sennaya Ploshchad, which when Dostoevsky knew it was called the Haymarket. In his era the Haymarket was alive with noise, mud and the suffering of the poor. Serfs were publicly beaten here.


Dostoevsky lived three times at three different houses on a narrow, cobblestone street here -- Kaznacheiskaya Street. ("The most Dostoevsky place in all of St. Petersburg,'' according to Biron. "He considered it the stomach of the city.'') The rancid smell of the canal -- women washed the family laundry in it, children bathed, and many used it as a toilet -- is gone now. But the claustrophobia of the place remains. The buildings are pressed against each other -- in contrast to the broad apartments so common in other parts of the city.


Dostoevsky wrote "Crime and Punishment'' in an apartment here that seems more like a punishment cell than a home. He started the book in 1865, after reading an article about a merchant's son from Moscow who had killed two old women with an ax. The murderer had been an Old Believer in rituals, a "raskolnik'' in Russian, and Dostoevsky seized on him to create Raskolnikov, his murderous, intellectual hero, who was his fictional neighbor on this street, as was the old lady he killed.


Merchants no longer sell hay in the square here. Cars, clogging the narrow alleys around the Griboyedova Canal, have taken the place of horses. But the cramped, musty feeling of the neighborhood has been preserved. It used to be filled with drunks and prostitutes. The prostitutes have moved to better locations, but men still weave uncertainly as they cross the Kokushkin Bridge.


When Dostoevsky lived here this place was as seamy as a seaport city can get. Once while he was crossing the square a drunken soldier offered him a silver cross, and the writer bought it although he knew he was being cheated. It turned out to be made of brass but Dostoevsky couldn't part with it and became very upset when he lost it.


It was on this bridge that Raskolnikov stood contemplating suicide, staring bleakly into the black waters beneath him. It was also in this neighborhood that Dostoevsky passed the worst moments of his life: in 1864 his wife died at 43; late that year so did his brother and then his friend Apollon Grigoryev. He said that his life broke in two at this point.


"It is as if the tragedy of Dostoevsky's life added a certain value to the neighborhood,'' Biron said. "There are simply some mystic places in St. Petersburg that never change in people's minds.'' Most of the square was destroyed during the Nazi siege of World War II. The buildings were reconstructed, but the mood never shifted.


Dostoevsky's city is surprisingly small. It takes only an hour or two to cover all of it. From his lodging house not far from Haymarket Square to the block where the old moneylender lived, Raskolnikov took 730 famous steps. Many people, including prominent actors, have tried to take the 730 steps from the house near the canal, where Raskolnikov is said to have lived, to the lodgings of the old women at what is now 25 Prospekt Rimskogo-Korsakova. Nobody has managed to find the right pace.


But they never stop trying. On this trip the courtyard is filled with ancient women. They look old enough to have lived when Dostoevsky made his habitual nocturnal forays here. They know without asking why we have come.


"It's up there," one shouts. "The spirit of the dead is still on the landing." The stairs are cluttered and cramped and there are graffiti all the way from the ground to the fourth floor. The apartment is not open, but the sense of danger is palpable. There are notes and banners stuck to the floor: "Do it again," says one. "Why did she die?" asks another.


"You rarely see a literary event so alive after this many years," Biron noted, before walking through the courtyard, back toward the canal where Raskolnikov hid his ax. "People still wonder if any man in a heavy coat could be the killer."


Then she laughed, as if suddenly remembering the work was fiction.


"It's funny," she said, looking out the window that once froze Raskolnikov. "He is not the most Russian of Dostoevsky's characters.


"Mitya Karamazov [in "The Brothers Karamazov"] is far more Russian, full of soul. Raskolnikov was a man of such pure ideas. He was too rational, too different. It had to be the Western influence. A Russian killer would have had an easier time in this city."


The same might be said for Dostoevsky himself. He was famous from the publication of "Poor Folk," his first novel, in 1846. But in part due to his own profligacy he never had an easy time of it. He was, after all, a man whom the tsar sentenced to death and then spared only as he stood at the gallows. Instead, he was sent to Siberia for four years.


He only found peace -- if that is a word that can be used to describe any part of his life -- as he grew older. Sitting in his apartment on the night of Jan. 28, 1881, he told his wife that he knew he was going to die. She knew he believed his premonitions so she tried to calm him. It did no good. He asked for the Bible he had carried with him in Siberia. He opened it, read it and died.


On Feb. 1 he was buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, at once one of Peter's grandest and most serene creations, at the age of 58 in the first such public event for a Russian writer. Eighty thousand people watched in silence as the dead writer was carried through the streets he invented.


Getting Around


To explore Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, the best place to begin is the F.M. Dostoevsky Memorial Museum and Museum Art Gallery at 5/2 Kuznechny Pereulok. There are two convenient metro stops: Vladimirskaya and Dostoevskaya; all taxi drivers will know the address as well.


The museum is the house where Dostoevsky lived the last part of his life and where he died. It's open daily from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., except Mondays and the last Wednesday of every month.


The museum's telephone and fax number is (812) 311-4031; fax only (812) 311-1804.


The museum's staff members can arrange tours. Biron speaks Russian and French. Others speak English. If you give the museum enough time, it can arrange for an interpreter as well.


The tours, which last about two hours, cost $50 no matter what the size of the group.