“On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.” Thus starts Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky in the rather sterile, but faithful, Constance Garnett translation. The names of the streets […]
The Nabokov Museum in St Petersburg
Vladimir Nabokov, the writer best known for the controversial novel Lolita, was born in a wealthy family in St Petersburg on 22 April 1899. He lived at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street until he was 18 when he and his family fled after the Communist Revolution. He considered it his only home and never bought another, […]
Stroganoff: The palace, the Count, the dish
One of the first things I did in my trip to St Petersburg is to try the local Beef Stroganoff. And as my hotel was on the junction of the Moika Embankment and Nevsky Prospekt, I was a stone’s throw away from the Stroganoff Palace itself, pink and sassy, still as exuberant today as it […]