Dostoevsky Museum

Tuesday I went to the Dostoevsky museum, which was a little more exiting. It was one of his many apartments recreated.

Dostoevsky's hat:


His office. He'd work all night, sleep, and then edit in the afternoons with the help of his wife:


Folder his later wife brought with her to work on The Gambler (the book Dostoevsky had to finish quickly to get money to keep writing Crime and Punishment), she was 20 at the time.


Where he smoked:




View from his window. Notice the church:


One section of it was created to depict and explain his literary works, so they had this little (kind of lame) displays that were supposed to look like scenes from his different novels.

Raskolnikov's room:




Pereveznetsev "White Nights" illustrations:




Laurel he was awarded for his speech at Pushkin's funeral:


Recreation of the shackles he wore while imprisoned:


In the evening several of us went to the Marriage of Figaro (a Mozart opera) at the Mariinsky, which was a lot of fun. Alex brought a friend of hers from Harvard who is from Russia originally and was just passing through on her way to visit family. She was interesting to talk to. The opera was pretty good and I was surprised at the quality of the voices considering it was the summer season. The opera is pretty funny, but horribly confusing. Between the English program I eventually caved in to buying, the Italian singing, and the Russian subtitles, we still had no idea what was going on half the time, and this was a group of supposedly smart students from Brown and Harvard. “So wait, he was supposed to marry his mother, before they realized they were mother and son…” Sad indeed. It was entertaining nonetheless.