Dostoevskaya Metro Station

At Vladimirskaya Square, where Zagorodny Prospekt begins, stands the above-ground pavilion of the Dostoevskaya metro station — one of the few stations on the St Petersburg metro dedicated to a specific writer. The station is on the Lakhtinsko-Pravoberezhnaya Line and is connected by a passage to the Vladimirskaya station.

Construction began back in 1980, when the station was known in the project documentation as "Vladimirskaya-2". It received its final name because of its proximity to the Fyodor Dostoevsky Memorial Apartment Museum in Kuznechny Lane and the street of the same name. For the above-ground vestibule, planners intended to demolish the neighbouring Delvig House, but in 1986 this triggered one of the first civic heritage-protection campaigns of perestroika-era Leningrad: activists collected signatures and held a rally on Vladimirskaya Square. In the end, the metro builders found a solution that preserved the house, and the station opened on 30 December 1991.

The vestibule, designed by architects Valentin Khilchenko and Alexander Konstantinov, was deliberately sunk into the courtyards of the surrounding buildings so as not to disturb the appearance of the old block; in 2006 an eight-storey commercial and business complex, "Regent Hall", was built nearby, and today access to the vestibule runs through its ground floor. The underground hall of the station is a deep-level column type, roughly sixty-two metres below ground, designed by architects Alexander Zhuk and Alexander Tokman. The hall's piers are faced with grey granite, and the walls along the tracks are lined with limestone of the same shade as the floor; at the far end is a mosaic panel, "Dostoevsky's Petersburg", created by a group of artists — Sergei Repin, Vladimir Sukhov, Ivan Uralov, Nikolai Fomin and Yevgenia Zhuk.

In 1989, while the passage to Vladimirskaya was being built, an accident occurred: the ground subsided, neighbouring buildings settled, some residents had to be temporarily evacuated, and trains on this section ran at reduced speed for a long time afterwards. Despite this, construction was completed, and upon opening the station immediately became part of one of the busiest interchange hubs in the city centre.

The southern end of the station leads to a hall with four escalators to Vladimirskaya, and from 1 July 2016 left-hand passenger movement was introduced on the interchange. Further along the line from the station runs a technical connecting track leading to another metro line — the Frunzensko-Primorskaya Line; before the opening of Spasskaya station in 2009, it was used to carry passengers as an ordinary section of track, and in August 2024 it was again included in the passenger scheme for two days. The above-ground vestibule operates on weekdays during daytime hours.

Dostoevskaya remains a rare example of a metro station with a coherent literary theme in its design: its granite vaults and mosaic recall to passengers a writer whose name is inseparably linked with this part of the city — from Vladimirskaya Square to Kuznechny Lane, where Dostoevsky spent the final years of his life.