A quintessential Romantic poet, Pushkin lived in this yellow canal-side mansion with his wife, Natalya, a quintessential Romantic beauty. His death from a duel with a French rake named George D’Anthes, who had pursued Natalya, remains the very icon of Romantic doom. The duel’s devious plot, set off by a scurrilous anonymous letter that’s on display in the house, reads like a thriller, and it still keeps Russians at the edge of their seats. Ethereally lovely Natalya looks down from her portrait on two peroxide blonds who are having that never-ending Russian argument about her: Did she or didn’t she (sleep with D’Anthes)? “Shame on you, comrades,” a gaunt babushka with Cleopatra eye makeup intervenes—then, for no particular reason, she volunteers a few lines from Eugene Onegin.

Pushkin’s 12-room apartment seems almost joyous—full of light and elegant polished furniture—if you don’t know that in his final years he was chronically in debt, bashed by critics, and stifled by court culture. Determined to keep my composure, I switch off the sappy audio guide and wander around, taking in the vest Pushkin wore to the duel, his guns, the female profiles he doodled in manuscript margins. Picturing him on the couch there in his study with a bullet lodged in his stomach, I mentally torture the vile D’Anthes, as I’ve been doing since childhood. Meanwhile real schoolchildren are asking their teacher: “Was D’Anthes a Nazi?” “Where did the Pushkins go to the bathroom?” And “Vladimir Pushkin—isn’t he … Russia’s president?” A collective laugh shakes the study’s bookcases.

Following Pushkin’s lead, Russian writers have celebrated St. Petersburg’s haunting aquatic beauty while in the same breath bashing Peter’s creation as the foreign, inhuman, altogether demonic opposite to hospitable, authentic, and Slavophile Moscow. Piter, as the city is nicknamed, has fulfilled its writers’ apocalyptic visions with a history that reads like a litany of calamities—floods, famines, revolutions, a 900-day Nazi siege—all ending in its humiliating degradation to second-class status under Lenin and Stalin, both of whom hated it. (The capital was moved to Moscow in 1918.)

No other writer has been more preoccupied with St. Petersburg’s malign genes than Dostoyevsky, who spent three decades there spinning Gothic yarns of madness and ax murders. Dostoyevsky described the local topography in such obsessive detail that his fans have a field day following in his characters’ footsteps. After a breakfast of cabbage piroghi (pies) at Stolle, the faux-19th-century café, Barry and I go into full Raskolnikov mode. First we loiter by the Sennaya (Haymarket) Square, a vice-ridden dump in Dostoyevsky’s day, now a post-Soviet dump next to a shopping mall and crowded with cell-phone kiosks. Next, Raskolnikov’s route takes us to the Griboyedov Canal, along which Crime and Punishment’s old murder victim and its saintly prostitute, Sonia, both lived. The houses there have been renovated and repainted and turned into New York–priced real estate, like the rest of Piter’s historic center. Near mustard-colored number 104—the old moneylender was bludgeoned right here—a thuggish-looking character in a cashmere coat is barking into his cell phone. “Probably ordering a hit on the guy who sold him a case of corked Petrus,” Barry says. Only the building’s courtyard remains authentically dumpy and sad. 

Sad too is the Dostoyevsky house-museum over in the less posh Kuznechny Market area. Always in debt (what else?), Dostoyevsky changed addresses 20 times between 1842 and his death in 1881. Here, in his last residence, he did manage to quit gambling and write The Brothers Karamazov, an instant best-seller. In English, Fyodor Mikhailovich’s prose reads rather smoothly; in Russian, it’s a wild, weedy garden. The densely marked-up manuscripts, shown in the museum’s literary section downstairs, testify to his seething, frenzied style.