Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
short story 'The Queen of Spades' is set in the house of a countess on Nevsky pr and
is the weird supernatural tale of a man who uncovers her Mephistophelean gambling
trick. Published posthumously,
The Bronze Horseman
is named for the statue of Peter
the great flood of 1824. The main character is the lowly clerk Yev-geny, who has lost
his beloved in the flood. Representing the hopes of the common people, he takes on
the empire-building spirit of Peter the Great, represented by the animation of the
Bronze Horseman
.
No other figure in world literature is more closely connected with St Petersburg
than Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81). He was among the first writers to navigate the
murky waters of the human subconscious, blending powerful prose with psychology,
philosophy and spirituality. Born in Moscow, Dostoevsky moved to the imperial cap-
ital in 1838, aged 16, to study, and he began his literary and journalistic career here,
living at dozens of addresses in the seedy and poverty-stricken area around Sennaya
pl, where many of his novels are set.
His career was halted - but ultimately shaped - by his casual involvement with a
group of young free thinkers called the Petrashevsky Circle. Nicholas I decided to
make an example of some of these liberals by having them arrested and sentencing
them to death. After a few months in the Peter and Paul Fortress prison, Dostoevsky
and his cohorts were assembled for execution. As the guns were aimed and ready to
fire, the death sentence was suddenly called off - a joke! - and the group was com-
mitted instead to a sentence of hard labour in Siberia. After Dostoevsky was pardoned
by Alexander II and returned to St Petersburg, he wrote
Notes from the House of the
Dead
(1861), a vivid recounting of his prison sojourn.
The ultimate St Petersburg novel and literary classic is Dostoevsky's
Crime and
Punishment
(1866). It is a tale of redemption, but also acknowledges the 'other side'
of the regal capital: the gritty, dirty city that spawned unsavoury characters and un-
abashed poverty. It's a great novel to read before visiting St Petersburg, as the Sen-
naya district in which it's largely set retains its dark and sordid atmosphere a century-
and-a-half later.
In his later works,
The Idiot, The Possessed
and
The Brothers Karamazov,
Dosto-
evsky was explicit in his criticism of the revolutionary movement as being morally
bankrupt. A true believer, he asserted that only by following Christ's ideal could hu-
manity be saved. An incorrigible Russophile, Dostoevsky eventually turned against St
