At Serpukhovskaya

The address is indicated in Dostoevsky’s note to Maikov from the end of August 1871: “…near Zagorodny Prospect (and the Technological Institute), on Serpukhovskaya Street, house No. 15 (Mrs. Arkhangelskaya’s), on the 2nd floor.” The modern address is Serpukhovskaya Street, No. 11; the house has not been preserved. Also, in Anna Dostoevskaya’s memoirs: “After a long search, I found an apartment on Serpukhovskaya Street, near the Technological Institute, in Arkhangelskaya’s house, and rented it in my name to spare my husband the household worries.” This address appears in Dostoevsky’s letters four more times, but without the housekeeper’s name. And in a letter to Yanovsky dated February 4, 1872, when giving his address, the writer specifically emphasizes: “NB. Not in Arkhangelskaya’s house.” Possibly, by that time the house had a different owner, and therefore we have no information about Mrs. Arkhangelskaya, who owned the house for a very short time. The Dostoevskys, as noted earlier, moved into this house on August 22 or 23, 1871, and lived here until leaving for Staraya Russa on May 15, 1872. Although the writer’s wife quite clearly writes in her memoirs that, when leaving Petersburg for the summer, they “rented out the apartment before leaving,” local history literature sometimes states that the Dostoevskys stayed on Serpukhovskaya Street until September 1872. It is also mistakenly indicated that the Arkhangelskaya house, which has not survived to this day, “stood on the plot between the modern houses No. 13 and No. 17.” This indication does not take into account that in 1889, when house numbering was standardized throughout the city, the numbers on Serpukhovskaya Street shifted, and the former No. 15 became No. 11. The Dostoevskys’ house at this address was described by Shtakenshneider: “The Dostoevskys lived somewhere far away, and lived poorly and in some strange house. I don’t recall now whether it was stone or wooden, but I remember that some strange staircase led to them and then an open gallery. Someone noted that Dostoevsky always loved apartments with strange staircases and passages; so was this one.” Evidence about the apartment is found in Anna Dostoevskaya’s memoirs: “The apartment consisted of four rooms: a study where Fyodor Mikhailovich worked and slept, a living room, a dining room, and a large nursery where I slept.”

This address of Dostoevsky is not widely known, but it was here in May 1872 that he posed for the artist Perov for the famous portrait, which was exhibited the same year at the Academy of Arts at the 2nd Peredvizhniki (Itinerants) exhibition.

Sources:

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