Raskolnikov's House

On the corner of Grazhdanskaya Street and Stolyarny Lane stands an apartment house that literary scholars link to the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" — it is here, by their reckoning, that the author lodged his Rodion Raskolnikov. The building is known in the city under two names: Raskolnikov's House and Iokhim's House, after the surname of its first owner.

The house was built in 1831 to a design by the architect Yegor Zollikofer in strict classical forms; the client was the saddler Iokhim, whose name became attached to the building. Originally the building had five storeys, and the district around Sennaya Square, onto which Grazhdanskaya Street opens, had in the nineteenth century a reputation as one of the poorest and most troubled in the capital — with cramped courtyards, cheap rented rooms and a great many drinking establishments. This atmosphere underlies the novel's topography: Dostoevsky, who himself lived nearby while working on the book, encoded real street names in the text — "S— Lane" conceals Stolyarny Lane, "K— Bridge" hints at Kokushkin Bridge, and "V— Prospect" at Voznesensky Prospect. The literary scholar Nikolai Antsiferov, in 1923, was among the first to propose that this very building was the hero's house, and the attribution became fixed in the city's tradition.

The carriage passage into the courtyard is closed off with wrought-iron grilles, and the courtyard itself, cramped by the density of the surrounding buildings, produces an oppressive impression similar to that described in the novel. On the wall two marble plaques survive marking the water level during the catastrophic flood of 7 November 1824, in Russian and in German; these markers date from the plot's earlier buildings. On the fourth floor, reached by a staircase of thirteen steps, the novel places Raskolnikov's tiny room and the flat of his landlady — a detail still recognisable in the building's actual layout today. A major reconstruction affected the building in 1970: builders removed the semi-basement storey, and the courtyard, previously paved with cobblestones, was covered with asphalt.

Over a century and a half the building has served many purposes: photographic studios operated here, including a phototype workshop in the late 19th century, along with a number of small artisan enterprises. In 2001 the house received the status of a cultural heritage site protected by the KGIOP, the city's committee for the preservation of historical monuments.

Today a memorial composition is installed on the building's corner façade — a bronze-and-granite stele 165 centimetres high, created by the sculptor Yevgeny Rotanov and the architect Vladimir Novosadyuk and unveiled on 7 July 1999. Its text was composed by the writers Dmitry Likhachev and Daniil Granin: it states that the tragic fates of the residents of this part of the city underlie Dostoevsky's passionate sermon on goodness.

Although the precise attribution of the novel's address to a specific building remains a matter of literary interpretation rather than a documented fact, the house on the corner of Grazhdanskaya Street and Stolyarny Lane has long become one of the most recognisable points on Saint Petersburg's literary map and an obligatory stop on routes devoted to Dostoevsky's work.