A brief stop at Rubinstein

The address was recorded in the police registration made in the Decree on Dostoevsky’s resignation, which served as his “residence permit”: “No. 172/31. Registered at the apartment on May 13, 1846.” This entry should be read as follows: house No. 172 in the old “through” numbering of the Moscow part of the 2nd quarter; the modern address is house No. 31 (Modern address: Rubinstein Street, No. 32, corner of Shcherbakov Lane, No. 10). Dostoevsky left the Pavlov house on May 24, 1846, when he went to Reval to visit his brother Mikhail for the entire summer. Upon returning in early September, he lived for several days with his younger fellow student from the Engineering School, the artist Konstantin Trutovsky; thus, by leaving, he had fully settled accounts for the old apartment and did not plan to return to it. It is difficult to say what guided the writer when he moved for a month before leaving for Reval from the house on Kuznechny to the house in Troitsky Lane. But documents (including the police registration from May 13) indisputably testify that having settled in the Pavlov house no earlier than the very last days of April, the writer lived there for less than a month. Perhaps that is why this address is unknown to local historians and has not been reflected in the literature about Dostoevsky’s Petersburg.

On the other hand, the erroneous claim that in the spring of 1846 the writer rented a small room in Kirpichny Lane has become widespread. In fact, Kirpichny Lane does not appear in any document or memoir testimony, but Dr. Yanovsky, recounting in his memoirs his acquaintance with Dostoevsky in 1846 and his treatment, “which began at the end of May and lasted until mid-July” (with the writer visiting the doctor “daily”), then incidentally notes: “At that time he [Dostoevsky] lived in some lane between Bolshaya and Malaya Morskaya in a small room with some landlady who rented rooms.” The only lane between the mentioned Morskaya streets is Kirpichny. It was this lane that, it seems, Holshevnikov was the first to indicate as the writer’s place of residence.

However, Yanovsky’s memoirs contain a double aberration: in 1846, on May 24, Dostoevsky left Petersburg for the entire summer to Reval and could not have undergone daily treatment with a doctor until mid-July. This could only have happened in 1847, when the writer actually remained in the city until mid-summer. It was then, apparently, that Yanovsky met Dostoevsky. What does this clarification change? Practically everything. It is well known that from February 1847 Dostoevsky lived in the Shil house at the corner of Voznesensky Prospekt and Malaya Morskaya. In its initial part (up to St. Isaac’s Square), Voznesensky Prospekt is extremely narrow and indeed resembles a lane. It is most likely this that the memoirist recalled when, almost forty years later, Yanovsky wrote his memoirs about Dostoevsky. So Kirpichny Lane as the writer’s address in the spring of 1846 turns out, to use Pushkin’s expression, to be a “hollow myth.”

Sources:

M. Basina: “The Life of Dostoevsky. Through the Twilight of the White Nights”

Boris Nikolaevich Tikhomirov: DOSTOEVSKY’S ADDRESSES IN PETERSBURG: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SOURCES AND AN EXPERTISE OF LOCAL HISTORY PUBLICATIONS

http://family-history.ru/material/biography/mesto/dostoyevsky/