On March 7, 1874, Dostoevsky writes to Goncharov: “...Ligovka — Gusev Lane, house No. 8 of Slivchansky. Apartment No. 17.” Also, in Strakhov’s letter to Shtakenshneider dated February 19, 1874: “...at the corner of Ligovka and Gusev Lane, house No. 8 on Gusev.” The modern address is: Ulyana Gromova Lane, No. 8, corner of Ligovsky Prospect, No. 25. The windows of the Dostoevsky apartment, as memoirists testify, faced the Ligovsky Canal. Dostoevsky briefly described the apartment in a letter to his wife dated August 19, 1873: “And the apartment itself is so bad and cramped, and the children’s room and yours are musty. Our dining room by the stairs is no good at all: nothing can be done there.” The Dostoevskys lived here from early March 1873 until May 1874, when, leaving for the summer in Staraya Russa, they permanently left Slivchansky’s house (on May 17, a receipt was noted, issued by the cooperative worker Grechin to Anna Dostoevskaya for receiving money “for transporting things to the storage” of the Gostiny Dvor in connection with their departure from Petersburg; however, the police supervising Dostoevsky as a former convict note that he left for Staraya Russa on May 22, 1874).

If we have no information about the writer’s communication with the landlords at his previous addresses in the 1870s — Mickiewicz, Arkhangelskaya, Fon-Meves — then the Dostoevsky family had rather specific relations with Slivchansky. “The choice of the apartment,” the writer’s wife recalls about the house in Gusev Lane, “was very unfortunate: the rooms were small and inconveniently arranged, but since we moved in the middle of winter, we had to put up with many inconveniences. One of them was the restless nature of the owner of our house. He was an old man, very peculiar, with various whims that caused great distress both to Fyodor Mikhailovich and to me.” The nature of these “distresses” is vividly illustrated by the following letter from Dostoevsky to his wife dated August 19, 1873: “Slivchansky is some kind of madman (I seriously think so),” the writer complains. “In December, he will tell us: move out, without any reason, and throw us out on the street. The other day, from the editorial office, Gladkov just sent me a very important letter from the prince addressed to me. In our editorial office, besides a servant, there is also a courier, and he walks around on the prince’s orders in Russian dress with a beard, but in dandy clothes and dandy boots. The courier rushes to me with a large sealed package in his hands, enters the staircase, wants to ring the bell — and suddenly the owner comes down the stairs from above: ‘How dare you walk on the front staircase! You are a peasant! Peasants don’t walk on this staircase in peasant clothes! March to the back door!’ He grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him down the stairs, and he had to go through the yard to the back door. He gets up at dawn and all day walks through all the staircases and the whole house, spying and enforcing order. I wanted to go to him and explain about the courier, but I reasoned that he would immediately tell me: move out. If he sees our children in the yard, he will certainly find fault with something and shout at the nanny, as he did with others: I will break him anyway then. And so I decided to move out at all costs. Continuous fear all winter and constant dread of quarrels — I will get sick from this with my sensitivity!” The next day Dostoevsky reports to his wife about the conversation with the landlord: “I was at Slivchansky’s. He was very polite but firmly declared that he would not allow peasants on the staircase.” In a letter dated August 10, 1873: “The landlord is crazy. The janitors are terribly rude, they don’t allow washing even the smallest things in the house and demand special payment for every service. To stack firewood or bring it — they just laugh at this: it’s not our business, they say.” It was primarily the quarrelsome nature of the landlord that made the Dostoevskys refuse the house in Gusev Lane. But what do we know about this Slivchansky? In the book “Dostoevsky in Petersburg,” Sarukhanyan calls him a “merchant.” Belov, in the notes to Dostoevsky’s correspondence with his wife, calls him a “count.” The landlord’s behavior, described in Dostoevsky’s letters, is difficult to reconcile with such social status. Anna Dostoevskaya in her memoirs calls the landlord an “old man.” However, from the Petersburg address book of 1867–1868, we learn that Moisey Petrovich Slivchansky was a collegiate counselor, serving in government service, i.e., a civil servant. From Dostoevsky’s correspondence with his wife, it appears that their landlord lived in the same house, at the corner of Ligovka and Gusev Lane. The answer to the question about the landlord’s name is found in the 1869 Neigardt address book, where about the owner of the house on Ligovka, No. 27, it is briefly noted: “Slivchansky Fyodor.” That is, the owner of house No. 25 on Ligovsky Prospect was titular counselor Fyodor Petrovich Slivchansky, who died in 1878. Interestingly, after Dostoevsky’s death, Anna Grigorievna in the autumn of 1881 again settled in this house at the corner of Ligovka and Gusev Lane (this time in apartment No. 19) and lived here until 1884. Fyodor Slivchansky was no longer alive, and the house belonged to his daughter — the wife of the civil engineer Alexandra Fyodorovna Prussak. It was in the writer’s wife’s apartment that members of the initiative group for publishing the first posthumous Complete Works of the writer gathered. And one of them, philosopher and literary critic Strakhov, writing the biographical sketch of Dostoevsky for the first volume, mentioning in passing that in the 1870s he “lived on Ligovka, No. 27, in Slivchansky’s house,” noted in parentheses: “(the very volume in which this edition of his works is made).”

Sources:

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