St. Petersburg in Literature

St. Petersburg in Literature

"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge." Thus opens Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, one of the greatest crime stories ever written, with the protagonist Rodion Raskolnikov making his way through 19th-century St. Petersburg. Both the grand landmarks and miserable details of St. Petersburg were so powerfully inspiring to the giants of Russian literature that the city became as much an inseparable part of their writing as it was of their lives.

The beloved Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) lived and died in St. Petersburg, and he honored the mighty capital in his works. In his epic Bronze Horseman, he immortalized the equestrian statue of Peter the Great on Decembrists' Square. In the poem, a poor clerk imagines that the rearing statue—which evokes the creative energy and ruthlessness of Peter, who used forced labor to build St. Petersburg—comes to life and chases him though the streets during one of the floods that regularly plagued the city. In his poetic novel Eugene Onegin, Pushkin writes of St. Petersburg's early-19th-century high society—of balls, receptions, theaters, and ballets.

In contrast, Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg is a place of catastrophes, strange events, crimes, and dramas. His heroes live desperate lives in a dank city of slums, poverty, and hopelessness. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-81) was born in Moscow but spent much of his life in St. Petersburg, and was so scrupulous about describing the city that you can find many of the places where his "brainchildren"—as he called his characters—lived. Dostoyevsky lived at 19 ulitsa Grazhdanskaya for a time, and many believe this is the apartment he used as a model for Raskolnikov's home. Today, modern graffiti ("Rodya [short for Rodion]!" and "We are With You!") covers the dilapidated stairwell leading to his former apartment. Dostoyevsky wrote that on his way to murder the elderly pawnbroker, Raskolnikov took 730 steps from his lodgings to the victim's lodging at 104 Kanal Griboyedova/25 ulitsa Rimskovo-Korsakova. You can re-create this walk, though it requires more than 730 steps.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) also portrayed a shadowy St. Petersburg—a city of nonsensical businesslike character and ridiculous bureaucratic fuss. In Gogol's short story "The Nose," the protagonist, low-rank civil servant Kovalyov, mystically loses his nose and must search through St. Petersburg to find it. The nose starts boosting its own bureaucratic career, obtains a higher rank than its owner, and ignores the desperate Kovalyov. To mark Gogol's satirical story, a bas-relief nose is displayed at the corner of Voznesenskii prospekt and ulitsa Rimskogo-Korsakova. The "memorial" regularly gets stolen.

The poetry of Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) reflects the changing face of St. Petersburg (renamed Petrograd and then Leningrad) during her lifetime. Born in the St. Petersburg suburb of Tsarskoye Selo, Akhmatova wrote in her early years romantic and nostalgic verse about her beloved city. As the city changed, so did her poetry, based in part on her firsthand experience of Stalin's repression. Her son was imprisoned and her works were harshly denounced by government officials. Her poem "Requiem" describes the horrors of those times. During the siege of Leningrad, Akhmatova read on the city radio her poems of support for the hungry and dying city residents.