Dostoevsky Memorial Museum
5/2 Kuznechny Pereulok, 011-7/812-311-4031
Metro: Vladimirskaya/Dostoevskaya
Daily 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Monday and the last Wednesday of each month

The museum is in Dostoevsky's last apartment, where he lived with Anna and their two children from October 1878 until his death two and a half years later. The couple's third child, Alexei, had died of an epileptic seizure in the spring of 1878, and they moved into this apartment largely to escape the difficult memories associated with their previous home. The building is the original one in which the Dostoevskys lived, but the apartment had not been preserved. It was later restored based on photos, drawings, and the many documents that Anna painstakingly saved after Dostoevsky's death. A few original items do remain: Dostoevsky's hat, for instance, and a tobacco box on which his daughter had written "January 28, 1881—Papa died."

The book cover depicts a view of the Neva and the Admiralteyskaya Embankment by Moonlight, 1882, by Aleksandr Karlovich Beggrov (cover designed by Louise Fili Ltd; image courtesy of Stage Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia/The Bridgeman Art Library) [enlarge photo]

Semyonovskiy Plats
Zagorodny Prospect, between Zvenigorodskaya Ulitsa and Podyezdnoi Pereulok
Metro: Tekhnologichesky Institut

Now a quiet park called Pionerskaya Ploschad, this square was the site of Dostoevsky's mock execution. He and other members of the Petrashevksy circle were sentenced to death for treason and brought here to be shot before the assembled crowd. The first three prisoners were tied to a stake and blindfolded. Just before the firing squad fired their shots a messenger announced that Tsar Nicholas I had commuted their sentence to hard labor—the fake execution proceedings had been an elaborate form of torture dreamed up by the tsar to punish the prisoners. Dostoevsky spent four years doing hard labor at a work camp in the Siberian city of Omsk, and several more years in compulsory military service.

Trinity Cathedral
Troistky Prospect at the corner of Izmailovsky Prospect
Metro: Tekhnologichesky Institut

Not to be confused with the Trinity Cathedral inside the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, this church with spectacular blue domes is where Dostoevsky married Anna Snitkina. Like many Orthodox Churches, it was shut down under Stalin's reign and did not open again until perestroika.

HISTORIC CENTER

Mikhailovsky Castle (Engineers' Castle)
2 Sadovaya Ulitsa, 011-7/812-210-4173
Metro: Nevsky Prospect/Gostiny Dvor
Daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; closed Tuesdays

This palace was built at the end of the eighteenth century by Tsar Paul I, who was so afraid of assassination plots that he dug a moat around the palace to hold back intruders. He felt so safe in this castle, however, that he dismissed most of his armed guards. In March 1801, only forty days after he moved into the supposedly impregnable new home, a group of government conspirators broke into the castle and strangled him. The castle later became an engineering school. Dostoevsky enrolled at the age of sixteen and lived between 1838 and 1841 in the building dormitory, where students liked to tell stories of Paul's ghost haunting the castle. Today the castle is part of the Russian Museum and contains a portrait gallery and temporary exhibition rooms.

Dostoevsky's Former Residence
8 Voznesensky Prospect (at the corner of Malaya Morskaya)
Metro: Nevsky Prospect/Gostiny Dvor

Dostoevsky was sleeping in his apartment here on April 23, 1849, when he was awakened by a dreaded knock at the door: the police had come to arrest him for participating in the dissident social group called the Petrashevsky circle. The writer had lived at this address for two years before his arrest, during which time he wrote "White Nights," his most romantic and bittersweet Petersburg story.

PETROGRAD SIDE

Peter and Paul Fortress
011-7/812-238-0511
Metro: Gorkovskaya
Hours: Monday and Thursday-Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Tuesday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; closed Wednesday; grounds remain open daily until midnight

The fortress was the first building erected in the city. Peter the Great converted part of the complex into a political prison soon after it was built, and its brutal conditions were infamous by the time Dostoevsky was brought here in 1849. For eight months he lived in a cell in the Secret House, a special high-security area within a building called the Alexeevsky Ravelin (also called the Alexis Ravelin), reserved for political prisoners that the tsar considered most threatening.

The Soviets turned the fortress complex into a museum, and several different exhibits, as well as the Peter and Paul Cathedral, are contained within its walls. The original Alexeevsky Ravelin was demolished in 1884, and a building containing administrative offices now stands in its place, still identified on maps as the Alexeevsky Ravelin. Visitors who want a taste of prison life, however, can tour the Trubetskoy Bastion, another tsarist-era jail.

Reprinted from Literary St. Petersburg: A Guide to the City and its Writers by Elaine Blair, courtesy of The Little Bookroom (littlebookroom.com/guidebooks.html), $16.95.