This week’s dream:

A literary tour of St. Petersburg

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.

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