Furnished rooms at 3 Yekateringofsky Prospect, apartment 7

The exact address is indicated in Dostoevsky's letter to Ivanova dated July 18, 1871: “…near the Yusupov Garden, at the corner of Bolshaya Sadovaya and Ekateringofsky Prospect, on Ekateringofsky Prospect, house No. 3, apartment No. 7.” The modern address is 3 Rimsky-Korsakov Prospect. The house has not been preserved (the current building dates from 1914). Also, in Anna Dostoevskaya’s memoirs: “We took two furnished rooms on the third floor of house No. 3 on Ekateringofsky Prospect.” The Dostoevskys lived here from July 10 to August 22–23, 1871. Their eldest son Fyodor was born here. According to Anna Dostoevskaya’s recollections, they “chose this area so that the girl could spend the hot July and August days in the Yusupov Garden, which was nearby.” It is also important to note that this house was adjacent to the house at the corner of Sadovaya Street (No. 47, modern No. 49) and Ekateringofsky Prospect, where Dostoevsky’s friend Maikov lived (who, by the way, was a godfather at the baptism of the writer’s son Fyodor in the Vvedenskaya Church on September 1, 1871). Neither Dostoevsky nor Anna Grigorievna mention the name of the homeowner (obviously because they dealt not with him but with the owners of the furnished apartment). The address books of St. Petersburg from that time allow us to conclude that the owner of house No. 3 on Ekateringofsky Prospect in the early 1870s was Mitskevich.

The Dostoevskys stayed in these furnished rooms temporarily due to lack of funds. Living for a long time “in furnished rooms was unthinkable: besides all sorts of inconveniences, the close proximity of small children, with their screams and cries, disturbed my husband’s sleep and work,” notes Anna Dostoevskaya. At the end of July – beginning of August, the writer, having been to Moscow, received from the editorial office of the “Russian Messenger” the next part of the fee for the publication of the novel “Demons.” “The money received was not particularly much,” continues Anna Grigorievna, “but it still made it possible to move from the furnished rooms to a winter apartment.”

Sources:

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