This week’s dream:

A tour of St. Petersburg’s literary shrines left me sobbing, said Anya von Bremzen in Culture & Travel. Many foreigners probably cannot fathom Russia’s near-idolatry of the poet Alexander Pushkin, who was “our Byron and our Beatles rolled into one.” A gambler and womanizer, Pushkin lived in a 12-room mansion on the Moika Canal. In 1837 Pushkin died in the house—now a museum—after being shot in a duel by a French admirer of his “ethereally beautiful” wife, Natalya. The exhibit at the Pushkin Museum includes the vest the poet wore in the duel, pages from his manuscripts, and the couch on which the 37-year-old died, “a bullet lodged in his stomach.”

Fyodr Dostoyevsky spent three decades in St. Petersburg, “spinning gothic yarns of madness.” His fans will have no trouble following the footsteps of Raskolnikov, the tortured hero of Crime and Punishment, from the Sennaya (Haymarket) Square to the Griboyedov Canal, along which the novel’s “saintly prostitute, Sonia, lived.” Dostoyevsky changed addresses 20 times and died in 1881 at a residence in the Kuznechny Market area. The Dostoyevsky Memorial museum now occupies the house in which he wrote The Brothers Karamazov, and a marked-up manuscript on display in the museum’s literary section testifies “to his seething, frenzied style.” Also on view in the six-room apartment, with its “mucky patterned wallpaper and dark petit bourgeois furniture,” is the couch on which Dostoyevsky often napped.

Vladimir Nabokov spent his childhood at a stylish Italianate mansion in St. Petersburg—also now a museum—before the author and his family fled the country in 1917. Among the “sundry Nabokoviana” on display are Nabokov’s butterfly net and lepidoptera collection. But the city’s most tragic victim of the 20th century was the “unpublished and destitute” poet Anna Akhmatova. In the Fountain House, a collection of crowded communal apartments in which Akhmatova lived from 1924 to 1952, a sketch of her by Modigliani “hangs on the walls of the monastically sparse room.” She owned virtually nothing besides her narrow bed, a desk, and a few books. Under perpetual scrutiny by the KGB, she would write a poem, ask a visitor to memorize it, and then burn the poem in a small bronze ashtray. The ashtray is still on view. A friend and I left the apartment “in silence, carrying our tears out into the rain.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Contact: Tour-to-stpetersburg.com