St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky: Life & Work

Tour duration, 4 hours. Drive in the city & 30 min walk

In this wonderful and intimate tour, you too will be drawn into the dramatic life, work and romantic love of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Following in Dostoevsky’s footsteps around St. Petersburg, you will visit Engineers’ Castle where he studied, houses where he lived and worked on his famous novels, the site of the writer’s mock execution at Semenovsky Square and then to the Hay Market Square, the city’s oldest existing market square and the core of St. Petersburg’s slums in the 19th century.

Dostoevsky’s apartment

The tour takes you inside Dostoyevsky’s last apartment at 5 Kuznechny Pereulok, just beyond the market where the writer lived during the last years of his life and where he wrote “The Brothers Karamazov”. The apartment is surprisingly cheerful and comfortable and provides an intimate perspective on the artist’s life. Dostoyevsky died of a throat haemorrhage while making an entry in his diary and the clock in his study was stopped at the exact time of his death – 8.38 pm, January 28, 1881. The Museum Literary exhibition offers a fascinating and detailed account of Dostoyevsky’s life and creative work, and the tour includes a visit to the practising Vladimirskaya Church, where the burial service for the writer took place.

Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg

This tour includes a 30 min walk in Dostoevsky’s actual literary landscape, haunted by the characters of his novel “Crime and Punishment”. You will follow the “murder route” from Raskolnikov’s house to the house of the Pawn Broker to discover that little has changed during the last one-and-a-half centuries. Throughout your visit you will meander through the marvellous maze of backstreets and yards of this sprawling stage set that is St. Petersburg – a city that itself is one of the main characters of Dostoevsky’s famous novels. The tour fittingly ends at the atmospheric Alexander Nevsky Monastery graveyard and Dostoevsky’s grave.

Said Virginia Woolf, “The novels of Dostoevsky are seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in. They are composed purely and wholly of the stuff of the soul. Against our wills we are drawn in, whirled round, blinded, suffocated, and at the same time filled with a giddy rapture.”

Combine this tour with others to make your own custom St Petersburg sightseeing tour. Call us for details