St. Petersburg

Peter the Great's imperial capital on the Neva, the city of Dostoyevsky's novels: its canals, tenements, and bridges the setting for Crime and Punishment, its social extremes the proof that the questions he asked were not hypothetical.

St Petersburg was raised on marsh by forced labour and laid out in straight lines to look like a European capital, which is part of why Russian writers kept finding it uncanny. Dostoyevsky arrived at sixteen to train as a military engineer and stayed. He walked the districts he wrote about and paced the distance from Raskolnikov's room to the pawnbroker's door. The summer light that never fully goes dark runs through the novels like a fever.