Is Dostoyevsky Still Alive?

To most Russophiles, Dostoyevsky is a literary demigod. To most Russians, his name recalls memories of literature class torture – of reading under duress.

With the approach of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky’s 200th birthday (November 11, or October 30 Old Style), natives of St. Petersburg (Peterburzhtsy or Pitertsy) – where Dostoyevsky became an adult and transformed the city into a character in 20 of his 30 novels – still feel haunted by the writer.

St. Petersburg, Russia’s “cultural capital,” is laden with a sense of its own literary importance. At least that is the myth that educated Pitertsy pass on to each generation. The historian Nikolai Antsiferov noted that Dostoyevsky was particularly responsible for this: the novelist “created real attitudes, expectations, and understandings of the lived experience of the city.” Reading Dostoyevsky, Antsiferov wrote, made “student poverty easier to bear: ‘All the adversities of Petersburg life are accepted beforehand: literature had made them attractive… I even liked the danger and prospect of hunger… I looked at life through the prism of literature.’ ”

Cultural historian Vladimir Toporov elevated the city’s literary aura even further. He was, he said, unable to determine conclusively where the city ended and the text began.

Early in 2021, pandemic be damned, a St. Petersburg literary circle (kruzhok) or, more accurately, book club, gathered at a tightly-packed and super loud Nevsky café. Assembled were three men and six women, most of whom were in their 20s and half of whom were named Dasha. The gathering inspired thoughts of modern-day Dostoyevskys and Petrashevskys convening to discuss the important issues of the day.

It was not to be. When the journalist in attendance tried to broach the topic of what today’s Pitertsy think about Dostoyevsky in his anniversary year, a wall of censorship slammed down. “The purpose of this group is to talk about what you read,” a male member explained. “It is not to ask questions.” Apparently, this modern-day literary kruzhok is not about a broad exchan

ge of ideas but about following a strictly defined set of rules.

Mercifully, when the official meeting ended, some of the circle returned to the question informally. The censor, unsurprisingly, did not chime in. A range of reactions to Dostoyevsky followed, but they centered on the requirement that all across Russia every ninth grader (15 years old) must read Crime and Punishment. It ruins Dostoyevsky for most of them.

One of the Dashas said, “I read Crime and Punishment because I needed to pass the literature exam when I graduated from school. I hated it. I mean, I was really anti-religious at that point, so it spoiled my whole perception of him.” She continued by saying that, as an adult, she was ready to return to Dostoyevsky after reading a great review of The Idiot. By now, she said, she is “more tolerant of the whole religious thing, so maybe it will go down smoother than last time.”

Indeed, most of the nineteenth century’s best fiction authors surely did not think they were writing for teenagers. When prompted by a censor to delete a scene of physical abuse of a child that was central to the point of a novel, Dostoyevsky complained, “We are not writing for ten-year-old children.” The feverish musings of Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, are unlikely to edify the lives of teenagers, already in a permanent state of semi-depression. While every Russian kid knows Crime and Punishment, their knowledge of Dostoyevsky stops there. They read him when they are too young to appreciate him, but old enough to remember never to make the mistake of reading him again.

“I have never finished a single book by Dostoyevsky… not even in school,” reported the group’s organizer. “I prefer to read about Dostoyevsky.” He is currently reading a French-authored biography of Dostoyevsky in Russian – though he also reads French.

Another Dasha said that, for most Russians, “Dostoyevsky is just an author. Just a writer.”

The circle concluded that it could not make assumptions about what “all of the people of St. Petersburg” or “all of the people of Russia” think about the author who haunts all of their lives. And, because of their bookishness, they were unsure if they could fairly represent broader society.

When Russians think about Dostoyevsky, they think about Crime and Punishment. And when they think about Crime and Punishment, they think about St. Petersburg. According to Konstantin, a tour guide and “Dostoyevsky-oved” (something like a cultural expert slash docent) who reads aloud from the novel while leading guests around the Haymarket Square (Sennaya ploshchad) neighborhood where the events of the novel took place, “Crime and Punishment is the most Petersburgian novel.” Indeed, tourism companies do not offer excursions dedicated to Dostoyevsky’s other novels.

So what makes Crime and Punishment so Petersburgian?

The twentieth century’s quintessential English-language biographer of Dostoyevsky, Joseph Frank (Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time), wrote that Dostoyevsky “does everything in his artistic powers to accentuate the squalor and human wretchedness that stream past Raskolnikov’s eyes or filter through his sensibility, as he walks through the streets filled with pothouses, brothels, and reeling drunks.”

While writing the novel, Dostoyevsky opined in a letter that he needed to stay in Petersburg instead of summering with friends: “In truth, the melancholy, sleazy and foul-smelling Petersburg of summertime fits with my mood and may even provide me with some pseudo-inspiration for my novel.” But then he added, “It’s too oppressive.” And Dostoyevsky put these words in the mouth of Raskolnikov’s mother: “How can anyone breathe here? Even outside it’s like being in a room without ventilation.”

Dostoyevsky’s name is so “inseparably bound up with St. Petersburg” that it is easy to forget that he was actually born in Moscow. His father sent him and his older brother to military training in the northern capital in May 1837. The future novelist despised military life and his inability to focus on writing and ideas at the College of Military Engineering. He was holed up in the mysterious St. Michael’s Castle in the center of town, where the guards had conspired to kill Tsar Paul I in 1801, and his ghost was said to still haunt the halls. According to the Dostoyevsky Museum audio guide, “Dostoyevsky was immediately plunged into a world of mystery and the unexplained.” When the young writer-cadet arrived in St. Petersburg, the city’s population was 468,625. It would double to 843,111 by the time of his death.

A young Dostoyevsky wrote in a letter that the city seemed like a grotesque puppet theatre: “I began to look around, and suddenly I saw these strange faces. They were all strange, marvelous figures… Someone hidden behind this whole fantastic crowd was making faces at me and jerking strings; the spirits and puppets moved, and he kept laughing and laughing!” St. Petersburg was a “city-apparition” or “city-myth” for Dostoyevsky, who was haunted by the fantastic in everyday life. Frank calls the city a “dissolving phantasmagoria” for his subject.

Throughout his Petersburg life, Frank writes, Dostoyevsky “continues to view the ordinary world around him as filled with the strange and uncanny; in the horde of Christmas shoppers flowing through the Petersburg streets, he suddenly sees ‘just in front of [him]…some sort of figure, not real but fantastic. [He is]… in no way able to shake off a state of mind disposed to the fantastic. Already in the 1840s they called [him] a fantasist and ridiculed [him] for it.’”

The Dostoyevsky Museum guidebook recounts that “No other city on the planet acquired such a Dostoyevskian face as this, the most deliberately made and insane megalopolis in the world.” The author lived 28 years in the city and never owned a single apartment. He was perpetually low on funds, changed addresses 20 times, and never lived in one place longer than three years. We do not even know all of his addresses, because many were sublets, for which there are no official municipal records. Dostoyevsky almost always chose corner apartments that had bigger rooms, but that also absorbed the stink and the noise of the street from more directions.

Konstantin starts his Dostoyevsky tours in Haymarket Square, where the fictional Raskolnikov overhears by accident that the old pawnbroker, whom he was considering murdering, would be home completely alone the next evening at 7 p.m.

Raskolnikov had no reason to end up in Haymarket Square south of his apartment on his walk home from his friend’s place on Vasilevsky Island to the north. Konstantin tells guests, “Raskolnikov did not mean to walk to this square. His legs brought him there themselves.” There, he accidentally overheard the conversation that would seal his fate. “St. Petersburg influences (vliyayet) Raskolnikov; it compels (zastavlyayet) him to commit the crime.” For Konstantin, “The crime was not only Raskolnikov’s crime; it was as if St. Petersburg itself committed the crime.” St. Petersburg is as much of a criminal – if not more – than the troubled student Raskolnikov. It has “a kind of force, a kind of energy that directs (upravlyayet) people.”

The Dostoyevsky Museum guidebook agrees with Konstantin: “Insane ideas could be born here as native to, and natural for, the place, and crimes could be committed, also of the sort uniquely characteristic for the city.” Local journalist Oleg Asanov wrote of Pitertsy in 1991, “We all have a bit of Raskolnikov in us.”

What is so oppressive about St. Petersburg? In answer, Konstantin contrasted the city with Dostoyevsky’s 10 years of political exile in wide-open Siberia: “St. Petersburg is an enclosed space (zamknutoye prostranstvo). The streets are narrow, the buildings loom over you, the rooms are like closets or even coffins.”

Raskolnikov’s Bloody Footsteps

“There were drunks here then, and there are still drunks here now… Look, here is a Dostoyevskian hero now.”

Walking around Haymarket Square on a summer Sunday afternoon, we heard car radios blaring loudly through open windows. It was a hot day, similar to the day described in the first line of Crime and Punishment. An HIV testing van sat parked outside the three metro stations that converge on the spot. Konstantin walked waving a copy of Crime and Punishment in his hand, and a curious passerby leaned in close to read the book’s title when the guide was looking the other way. The native Peterburzhets said that drunk people used to hang out in this undesirable quarter in Dostoyevsky’s time and just then, as if to prove those words true, a drunk guy shoved a bottle into Konstantin’s face.

As he headed toward the fake Raskolnikov’s alleged domicile, Konstantin suddenly stopped at the intersection of Stolyarny pereulok and Kaznacheyskaya ulitsa. “If we look this way, we see Catherine Canal. If we look this way, we see Catherine Canal. If we look this way, we see Catherine Canal.” Now called Griboyedova and running through the very center of the city, the canal interrupts the otherwise reliable plan of Peter the Great’s very planned city. Dostoyevsky believed that this zone held a hidden spiritual significance: Stolyarny pereulok and Grazhdanskaya ulitsa form the beams of the cross, with the cross ending at Kazanskaya ulitsa and, of course, at the Catherine Canal.

It is a favorite pastime of Dostoyevsky fans to walk the purported 730 steps between Raskolnikov’s apartment and that of the pawnbroker whom he killed. The author wrote with such specificity that obsessives spent the entire twentieth century determining exactly where his made-up characters lived in their real city.

A map of St. Petersburg sat on the author’s desk as he wrote. Raskolnikov turned twice to the right and crossed the K— Bridge (obviously Kokushkin Bridge), according to Konstantin, “not because the descriptions were always perfectly accurate, but in order to create the illusion for readers that the events about which he was writing really happened.”

Dostoyevsky was not writing a scientific treatise or recording for posterity the contours of the city, so those who try to walk the supposed 730 steps may find themselves disappointed. But, Konstantin said, the author was oxymoronically “creating the illusion of reality.” According to the Dostoyevsky Museum guidebook, “Lulling the reader with apparent realism – a seemingly exact and faithful topography, he freely ‘moved’ houses, changed owners, displaced streets, and added floors. He thus succeeded in creating a complex image of the city as a character in its own right.”

When Konstantin guides larger groups, especially ones with younger clients, he has them count the actual steps. They usually end up taking more like 750 or 780. However, a group of young Moscow women used the step counter feature on a smartphone and got exactly 730. Perhaps no one except Dostoyevsky can both walk and count to 730 at the same time.

While walking to the pawnbroker’s building without counting his steps, Konstantin said, “When Dostoyevsky was writing Crime and Punishment, Stolyarny pereulok, where Raskolnikov lived, was the most drunken street in the whole city.” As we walked on that lane, another drunken resident stumbled up with a bottle and informed Konstantin, “You will drink this!” A fake, bedazzled eighteenth-century carriage clomped past.

In the fake pawnbroker’s real yard are two entrances. Raskolnikov could enter through one without being noticed by the dvornik (yard-keeper or super) who was busy at the other. A cart of hay even materialized as if from nowhere to block everyone’s view of Raskolnikov as he passed through the yard and over the threshold into the pawnbroker’s world. The city helped him commit the crime.

Even the Buildings Are Depressing

Tour guide Konstantin, who goes around quoting aloud from Crime and Punishment in the streets, said that he did not like or understand the book when he read it in school for the first time.

 Similarly, a 40-something Peterburzhenka recalled that, “we were forced to read him in school. We couldn’t appreciate his talent at that age. I have never read Dostoyevsky except for being forced to. As an adult, I’ve picked up some Pushkin poems and War and Peace. But Dostoyevsky? No, thank you!... When I’m in the region around Vladimirskaya and Dostoyevskaya, I feel depressed. The buildings are gloomy.”

A member of the literary kruzhok reported that she can almost feel Dostoyevsky’s presence when walking in her city: “Whenever I am in a yard in St. Petersburg, in the center of the city, but not on its fancy side, I always have some insights from his books. I have this impression that nothing has actually changed that much in these small corners of St. Petersburg.”

The “courtyards” (dvory) are incredibly important to understanding St. Petersburg – though they have no grass or trees as the English term might suggest. In the city center, wealthy nineteenth-century families and their guests entered apartments from the “fancy side,” but there was an entire network of “black entrances” that only servants ever saw. In our more equitable era, formerly huge apartments have been cut up into tiny pieces, with some left with windows that only look out onto these depressing, concrete, interior yards.

Standing in such yards, one can look up at the sky as if through a tunnel, which is why they are also called a kolodets (literally a “well”). Another Peterburzhets, a real estate agent, said that kolodtsy are essential to understanding Dostoyevsky: “Raskolnikov lived in one. If you lived there and looked out on the kolodets 24 hours a day, you would go crazy and murder everyone too.”

Most downtown buildings are yellow – a pastel tone that might sound lovely to a New Yorker surrounded by a concrete jungle. But today’s Pitertsy find it sickening. Dostoyevsky did too. Crime and Punishment makes constant reference to how revoltingly yellow everything is. Konstantin even said, “The entire novel is built on the color yellow.” Dostoyevsky despised official buildings, which were all yellow. A “yellow house” signified an insane asylum. Prostitutes carried yellow identity cards. If you stand in the middle of Haymarket Square – which is technically impossible since the square is now split by a busy street – every building you see around you is a different shade of yellow. Do you prefer lemon yellow, jaundiced-baby yellow, or Dostoyevsky-on-his-deathbed yellow? Many tourists find that the yellow paint brightens a perpetually cloudy city. But natives just think it is gross. One Peterburzhenka, who works as a manicurist in the Haymarket Square area, said that she prefers the gray communist-block neighborhoods that would have been outside of the city limits in Dostoyevsky’s time to the gross yellowness of her workplace.

A weirdly small building stands on the edge of Haymarket Square. It looks like a large utility closet but is really there to remind Pitertsy that a beautiful church once stood on the site – in Dostoyevsky’s time. It too is yellow. The non-church frequently rings electronic non-bells to mark the top of no hour, making this square even more mystifying and bizarre.

Instead of a Conclusion

The NDT – Nebolshoy Dramatichesky Teatr (Not-big Dramatic Theatre) – stages an immersive play, “In the Footsteps of Raskolnikov,” on the streets of St. Petersburg about once a month. Three of the company’s actors, playing a narrator, Raskolnikov, and Sonya Marmeladova, attracted about 22 guests on the last Sunday in August at twilight. Almost all audience members were women, and the only men who came were coupled up with women. Perhaps a Russian audience keeps going on these Dostoyevsky tours and Crime and Punishment encounters to make sense of their high school reading experience now shrouded in mystery.

NDT reorders the events of both Crime and Punishment and Dostoyevsky’s life to fit the geography of the streets of St. Petersburg. Though the murder takes place near the beginning of the novel, with the remainder about how Raskolnikov suffers for his crime, the street play culminates in Raskolnikov doing the deed in the pawnbroker’s yard and returning to the audience with bloodied hands. Sadly, NDT does not have the power to let its guests into the actual apartment where the fictional murder took place.

After all, real people live real lives here, even in the fictional murder apartment. As more than 20 people huddled on a parapet on the edge of Kokushkin Bridge, a local resident walked by shaking his head and sucking his teeth with a loud “Tsk.” For residents of the Haymarket Square neighborhood especially, Dostoyevsky’s popularity never wanes, never ends, never fades into obscurity no matter how much Russians hated reading him in school. It may even grow with increasing leisure time, disposable income, and the need to post the perfect Instagram shot – the shot that communicates: “I am a cultured Russian.”

As the immersive street play set off for its first destination and the narrator turned on the loud “scene change” music, the perambulating viewers felt the giddy excitement that comes with wondering if every person on the street was placed there for their benefit. Every turn of a corner might hold a surprise, a person or object planted for the group’s sake amid the banal daily lives of others who were not in on the secret. The audience began to feel that St. Petersburg’s streets were loaded with the mystical, the fantastic, the things that some higher power had placed there purely for them to see and feel – just as Dostoyevsky would have thought.