After the death of Emperor Nicholas I, the writer, like other Petrashevsky Circle members, was pardoned by Alexander II. In 1859, Dostoevsky received permission to live in Tver, and then in St. Petersburg. At the end of December 1859, Dostoevsky returned to St. Petersburg with his wife and adopted son Pavel, but the unofficial surveillance of the writer continued until July 9, 1875. After his arrival, together with his brother Mikhail, he began publishing the magazines "Vremya" and "Epokha." Immediately upon arriving in St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky and his family settled in furnished rooms, and in March 1860 moved into a corner two-story stone house belonging to merchant Palibin in the Third Company of the Izmailovsky Regiment, where he lived until September 1861. The house, owned by N.A. Palibin, has not survived to this day. The modern address is 3rd Krasnoarmeyskaya Street, No. 5, but the house no longer exists. The contract signed by Dostoevsky with the landlord has been preserved: “On March 3, 1860, I, the undersigned retired second lieutenant Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, concluded this contract with Actual State Councillor Nikifor Alekseevich Palibin that I rented an apartment No. 10 with water, a wood shed, an ice cellar, and an attic in His Excellency’s house located in the Narvskaya Part of the 1st Quarter, No. 5, from April 3 to September 3, 1860, for one hundred and forty rubles in silver, with payment for the month in advance at twenty-eight rubles in silver...”

This was obviously not the first contract (nor the last with this landlord), since in a memorial note titled “Where I was registered,” Dostoevskaya indicates: “Narvskaya Part of the 1st Quarter, in the 3rd company of the Izmailovsky Regiment, house No. 5, registered from December 28, 1859. In the autumn of 1860, in the same house, Dostoevsky rented another apartment — ‘entrance No. 12 from October 16, 1860 to August 15, 1861...’” The documents cited allow us to date Dostoevsky’s residence in Palibin’s house from late December 1859 (actual move-in usually occurred a few days before police registration) until the end of August 1861 (the contract for moving into Astafyeva’s house is dated September 1, 1861). It should be noted that, contrary to the description in Sarukhanyan’s book of landlord Palibin as a “merchant,” he was not only an actual privy councillor but also a professor of criminal and civil law, who at one time taught at the Main Engineering School where Dostoevsky studied (in particular, he administered Dostoevsky’s half-year exam in jurisprudence in 1842).

In 1860, a two-volume collection of Dostoevsky’s works was published. Nevertheless, since contemporaries failed to give a worthy assessment of the novellas “Uncle’s Dream” and “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants,” Dostoevsky needed a second loud literary debut, which became the publication of “Notes from the House of the Dead” (first published in full in the magazine “Vremya,” 1861–1862). This innovative work, the precise genre of which literary scholars still cannot define, stunned readers across Russia. For contemporaries, the “Notes” were a revelation. Before Dostoevsky, no one had touched on the theme of depicting the life of penal servitude. Nearly ten years of physical and moral torment sharpened Dostoevsky’s sensitivity to human suffering. This single work was enough for the writer to take a worthy place both in Russian and world literature. According to Herzen, in “Notes from the House of the Dead,” Dostoevsky appeared as a Russian Dante descending into hell. Herzen compared the “Notes” to Michelangelo’s fresco “The Last Judgment” and tried to translate the writer’s work into English, but due to the difficulty of translation, the publication was not realized.

In 1995, a memorial plaque was installed on the building constructed on the site of Palibin’s house with the following text: “At this place stood a revenue house where from March 1860 to September 1861 lived the great Russian writer Dostoevsky and worked on ‘Notes from the House of the Dead’ and the novel ‘Humiliated and Insulted.’” The plaque is installed on the wall facing Yegorova Street, which did not exist during the years Dostoevsky lived here (it was laid out in 1871).

Sources:

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

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

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