“An Insignificant Tavern Conversation Had an Extraordinary Influence on Him…” (Tavern Meetings of Rodion Raskolnikov in the Local History Context)

he article is devoted to a particular issue of artistic topography of the most St. Petersburg work of Russian literature — “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky. Using address books, atlases, and other reference literature of the 19th century, it traces the routes of the novel’s main hero Rodion Raskolnikov in relation to the urban realities of the Northern capital in the mid-1860s. The author of the article focuses on Raskolnikov’s meetings with Zametov in the Crystal Palace tavern and with Svidrigailov in an unnamed tavern on —sky Prospekt “thirty or forty steps from Sennaya” Square, as well as real St. Petersburg taverns — “Palais de Cristal” and “Sukharevka”, which served as prototypes for the places where the above-named episodes of the novel are played out. The article revises the traditional view, which already has a century-old tradition, according to which the meetings of the protagonist with Zametov and Svidrigailov took place in the same tavern on Obukhovsky (now Moskovsky) Prospekt. The Svidrigailovsky tavern is identified in the article with the real Sukharevka, vividly depicted in the novel by Vs. Krestovsky “Petersburg Slums” (1864–1867), and the “Crystal Palace” in the novel — with a tavern at the “Palais de Cristal” hotel on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Voznesensky Prospekt (a long-established fact, which, however, was subjected to skepticism in the traditional approach). For the first time, there was a solid factual basis for the existence on Obukhovsky Prospekt of the “Palais de Cristal” café, which was homonymous with the hotel on Sadovaya and opened in 1874, eight years after the writing of Dostoevsky’s novel, and which obscured the real picture of the artistic topography of “Crime and Punishment”.