Dostoevsky called St Petersburg “the most premeditated city in the world” — and he wrote not about the ceremonial embankments but about what lies behind them: Sennaya with its market and taverns, tenement houses with their back stairs, courtyards the sun never reaches. This was where the urban poor, students, minor clerks, bohemians and criminals lived, and where the writer lived himself.
This walk covers the Sennaya quarters with Crime and Punishment as the guidebook. Dostoevsky described real buildings and placed his characters in them so precisely that the route can be read straight off the page: from Raskolnikov’s flat to the pawnbroker’s house is exactly the number of paces the author counted out.
Two and a half hours on foot at an unhurried pace, with stops for coffee or tea — which matters, because the route runs through ordinary residential streets rather than museum halls.
Sennaya Square — the heart of that part of the city: the market, the drinking dens, the flophouses. The place Raskolnikov comes to make his confession, and one of the novel’s principal “characters”.
Raskolnikov’s house — the corner tenement by Stolyarny Lane, with the very garret under the roof. We count the paces to the old pawnbroker’s house: Dostoevsky measured them himself.
The pawnbroker’s house — on the Griboyedov Canal embankment: the entrance, the courtyard, the staircase, all still there.
Sonya Marmeladova’s house — the “hideous obtuse angle” of the room described in the novel is easy to pick out from the facade.
The well-yards — the real thing: cramped, sunless, with a square of sky far above. They are what makes the claustrophobia of Dostoevsky’s characters immediately understandable.
Dostoevsky’s own addresses — the flats in this same district where he lived and worked. He moved constantly and always chose corner buildings with a view of a church.
Not one of these buildings is marked by anything more than an occasional plaque: they are ordinary residential blocks that thousands of people walk past every day. Without a guide the route simply does not exist — you have to know it.
Along the way you will hear how Fyodor Mikhailovich’s own life unfolded: the penal colony and the scaffold he was taken down from a minute before execution, the gambling addiction, the debts, the second wife and stenographer who saved him from a ruinous contract, and the haste and want in which Crime and Punishment was written. And how the district he lived in produced the novel through which the whole world pictures St Petersburg.
The tour is private and on foot — your party only. Wear comfortable shoes and dress for the weather.
Sennaya Square
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 1 | $71 |
| 2 | $39 |
| 3 | $28 |
| 4 | $23 |
| 5 | $20 |
| 6 | $18 |
| People | Price per person |
|---|---|
| 7 | $16 |
| 8 | $15 |
| 9–10 | $14 |
| 11 | $13 |
| 12–14 | $12 |
| 15–16 | $11 |
| People | Free places | Price per person |
|---|---|---|
| 10–14 | +1 | $12 |
| 15–24 | +2 | $10 |
| 25–40 | +2 | $8 |
Group rates apply from 10 people.
Peterhof by hydrofoil: forty minutes across the Gulf of Finland on a foil-borne vessel, and a walk through the Lower Park with the Grand Cascade and Samson.
A city tour of St Petersburg by car with a visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress: Nevsky Prospect, Palace Square, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island, the cruiser Aurora — and the island where the city began.
The Russian Museum with a guide: from twelfth-century icons to The Ninth Wave, The Last Day of Pompeii and Repin — a thousand years of Russian art in one walk through the Mikhailovsky Palace.
The essentials of St Petersburg in three hours: Palace and Senate squares, the Summer Garden and the Field of Mars, the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island and the place the city began — told through stories rather than dates.
