Gorokhovaya St., 41, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 190031
One of the most important centers of the artistic topography of the novel The Idiot is Parfyon Rogozhin’s house. In this house, which Ippolit compared to a cemetery, Rogozhin’s elderly mother blesses the prince, after which he exchanges a pectoral cross with Parfyon—they become blood brothers. It is here that Myshkin’s prophecy comes true: Rogozhin will stab Nastasya Filippovna, and both heroes will weep, embracing, by her body. So where is this gloomy three-story old house? The location of the house on Gorokhovaya Street, “not far from Sadovaya,” seemingly clearly indicated by the author, raises many questions among local historians, believes Boris Tikhomirov, director of the Dostoevsky Museum and a leading expert on his work.
This house was large, gloomy, three stories high, without any architecture, colored a dirty green. Some, very few, houses of this kind, built at the end of the last century, have survived almost unchanged precisely on these streets of Petersburg (where everything changes so quickly). They are built solidly, with thick walls and very few windows; on the ground floor, windows sometimes have bars. Mostly, there is a money-changing shop downstairs…
Almost exclusively merchants live in these houses. Approaching the gates and looking at the inscription, the prince read: “House of hereditary honorary citizen Rogozhin.”
In the novel, the reader sees Rogozhin’s house through the eyes of Prince Myshkin: “One house, probably because of its peculiar physiognomy, attracted his attention even from afar, and the prince later remembered that he said to himself: ‘This is probably the very house.’ With extraordinary curiosity, he approached to verify his guess; he felt that for some reason it would be especially unpleasant for him if he guessed right. This house was large, gloomy, three stories high, without any architecture, colored a dirty green. Some, very few, houses of this kind, built at the end of the last century, have survived almost unchanged precisely on these streets of Petersburg (where everything changes so quickly). They are built solidly, with thick walls and very few windows; on the ground floor, windows sometimes have bars. Mostly, there is a money-changing shop downstairs. <…> Both outside and inside it was somehow inhospitable and dry, everything seemed to hide and lurk, and why it seemed so from the physiognomy of the house—it would be hard to explain.”
— The decisive circumstance in choosing this particular address turns out to be Myshkin’s clarification, who, having experienced an almost hypnotic impression from the exterior view of Rogozhin’s house, tells him: “I guessed your house just now, approaching, from a hundred steps away…”
For Dostoevsky, who spent four years in penal servitude in shackles, the step was different, not as wide as that of our local historians. Besides, it should be taken into account that the writer was not very tall—only 1 meter 68 centimeters, which also affects the length of the step.
In local history literature, four different “Rogozhin houses” on Gorokhovaya are indicated: Gorokhovaya 28, 33, 38, and 41. Boris Tikhomirov believes that topographically and considering the text of the novel, only one fits—the No. 41, the second on the left after the Semyonovsky Bridge, if you go, like Prince Myshkin, from Zagorodny. If one accepts the point of view that Dostoevsky “transferred” some other house to Gorokhovaya, then the closest to the matter is the Moscow house of merchant Mazurin on Myasnitskaya, where he killed the jeweler Kalmykov. Gorokhovaya has a special aura in Dostoevsky’s novels: Stavrogin’s crime with Matryosha also takes place on Gorokhovaya, explains Boris Tikhomirov.
— There may be several answers here, — Tikhomirov believes. — The easiest to point out is that Dostoevsky wrote the novel The Idiot abroad and could only approximately recall what the house really looked like in which he decided to settle his hero.
To this can be added that The Idiot is not a physiological sketch, and the writer has the right to transform the external appearance of a real house in accordance with his artistic task. And that task was to deepen not only the characterization of this character but also the entire life force that gave rise to him through the description of “Rogozhin’s house,” seen through the insightful gaze of Prince Myshkin.
Sources:
https://www.fontanka.ru/longreads/68640517/
Text by Maria Bashmakova
