Raskolnikov's Trail

Now a story for you Dostoevsky fans! Saturday I went with some friends on a Dostoevsky walk, which was just perfect as right now I'm reading Crime and Punishment, his dark tale of the murderer Raskolnikov, set in Saint Petersburg in the 1860s. We took the Metro to Sennaya Ploschad (or the Haymarket) which in Dostoevsky's time was a place infamous for its seedy taverns and illicit activities. Although it's still a commercial district, it's cleaned up its act since then and is now full of flashy stores with neon signs and a huge new shopping mall that was identical to any back home - they really are the same the world over! It's strange how with regards to clothing, the English language is so fashionable. You almost never see anyone wearing a shirt of jacket with a logo or script in Cyrillic; to be cool enough to be fashionable, it just has to be in English, no matter how much it doesnt make sense, yay Engrish! And yet despite this craze for English logos and designs, no-one in Russia actually seems to speak it! Only one language is fashionable here, much to my detriment.. I'm muddling along these days with Russian, but it's real tough going.

Back to Dostoevsky. We passed by at least 4 apartment buildings where he lived; apparently he liked to gamble and had to move around alot to escape his debtors! Interestingly, he set the action of Crime and Punishment in the area he lived in, which was then a pretty bad part of town and which doesnt seem to have changed all that much since then - still pretty filthy and oh the smell! We then went to the building where his character Raskolnikov lived from where he began his journey to the apartment of his victim, the old pawnbroker - although the story is entirely fictional, Dostoevsky's detailed descriptions are so accurate and true to reality that it's possible to know the exact buildings he wrote about! We then traced the murderer's trail as he trudged through the streets, axe under coat, pausing like he does to stare into the dark water of the Gribodeyev Canal (they're everywhere in downtown Petersburg, hence it's nickname The Venice of the North!). The best part was the pawnbroker's building - although nothing is marked, our guide book gave us the exact address of the flat and said that the tenants don't mind you coming inside to take a look, so we crept up the musty, dimly-lit twisting stairway that Dostoevsky describes so well. And there it was, Flat 74! Site of the murder, Raskolnikov's name in Russian scratched into a nearby wall by some literary graffiti artist! It was very exciting to see the actual place he was describing and compare it to what I had imagined. It's a very atmospheric place, especially on a grey day, like we've been having all the time lately - definitely worth a trip if you enjoyed Crime and Punishment!