The most embarrassing memory of my childhood is of my mother having a meltdown at the Pushkin Apartment Museum in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known back in the USSR. I was 10, and this was to be our farewell trip to Russia’s cultural capital, an excursion from Moscow, where we lived. Farewell because Mother and I were about to emigrate to America, which in those Iron Curtain days meant abandoning all hope of return. So on this sad visit, Mom and I retraced the murderous route of Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, reread Gogol’s phantasmagoric St. Petersburg tales, wandered among the statuary in the imperial Summer Garden, which Pushkin considered his living room. And it goes without saying that we paid our respects to the apartment-museum on the Moika Canal where on January 29, 1837, the 37-year-old Pushkin expired in agony after being shot in a duel.

Such is our national Pushkin cult that the details of his final days make every Russian eye well up. But by the time our young tour guide was recounting Alexander Sergeyevich’s very last hours, my usually reserved mother wasn’t just shedding a tear. No, she sobbed and she wailed—like a pagan Slav at a funeral. The guide broke down herself, and as if on cue, the whole group joined in. Uzbeks with gold teeth, collective farmworkers, literary old ladies—they all began weeping in Pushkin’s airy, book-filled study. I don’t know why Mother then decided to announce that in fact she was crying because we (Jews) were emigrating from Russia. I can still see the disgust on people’s faces as they fled the building. She might as well have said we were lepers. For the rest of the trip, I just sulked.

Now, almost 30 years later, back in the city once more called St. Petersburg, I’m sobbing myself—by the communal apartments where the great 20th-century poet Anna Akhmatova lived during Stalin’s terrors. Maybe it’s the sight of the little bronze ashtray in which Akhmatova furtively burned the manuscript pages of Requiem, her unbearably tragic poem dedicated to the victims of purges. Or perhaps, as the rain pours, the brutality of the culture that murdered and tormented its writers finally comes down on my boyfriend, Barry, and me with full force. Russia, the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam once declared, was the only country in the world where a poem could get you killed. To tour St. Petersburg’s literary shrines, as we’ve set out to do, is to visit stations of heartbreak.

Modern Russian poetry and prose were born here, in this European-style capital founded by Peter the Great in 1703 in chill Baltic swamplands upon the bones of serfs who perished constructing it. St. Petersburg’s sheer newness, its artificiality (the world’s most abstract and premeditated city, said Dostoyevsky), its stony geometry, not to mention the marriage of brutality and grandeur that marked its inception, have haunted the Russian literary imagination since, well, Pushkin. St. Petersburg’s cobblestones and canals are so entwined with the city’s literary mythology that, in the words of Joseph Brodsky, “you can’t distinguish the fictional from the real.

Which is why, before shedding tears for Akhmatova, I stand beside the hulking statue of the great Peter on horseback and lecture Barry on the fundamental importance of our national poet. Grandeur versus squalor and tyrants versus superfluous men. The ur-Russian leitmotifs of doom, death, and revenge. Pushkin set out all these classic St. Petersburg tropes for all time in his late narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, in which this very statue breaks loose and chases a poor, mad clerk through city streets.

“I’m going mad, too, with all your Pushkin, Pushkin already!” Barry says, as I drag him past pastel-colored facades and along stately embankments toward the poet’s apartment.

“How dare you!” I retort. I guess Russia’s Pushkin idolatry can seem pretty baffling to a foreigner. But Pushkin is our Byron and our Beatles rolled into one. Scratch that: Pushkin is our everything, as another poet declared. We love the vitality of his poems and prose, the way he flung open the treasury of the Russian language to us when our educated classes used only French. Even more, we adore Pushkin the man, who gambled and womanized while tossing off the luminous verses that can deliver a profound meditation on death and an ironic discourse on dandyism—all in one stanza. “He just gives Russians a great image of themselves—and, man, they need it,” Barry declares as we reach the museum on Moika Canal. He’s right, but I glare at him anyway. 

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.

Dostoyevsky’s hat and his endless debt notices are displayed in the upstairs apartment, mostly a modern reconstruction filled with period objects and memorabilia. In the suite of six low-ceilinged rooms with mucky patterned wallpaper and dark petit bourgeois furniture, a claustrophobic domesticity reigns. After dictating all night to Anna, his fireball stenographer-biographer-executor-wife, Dostoyevsky would always take a nap on a tatty couch in his dowdily neat study, burrowing under a sheet, two blankets, and an old coat. On a tobacco box, his daughter Luba’s childish handwriting reads: “January 28, 1881—Papa died.” Heartbreaking.

But still. Compared to what the 20th century had in store for Russian writers, Dostoyevsky’s life seems a drizzly stroll in the park. At our hotel, the Angleterre, the lyric poet Sergei Yesenin hanged himself in 1925. Other suicides—or were they political murders?— followed: the writer and Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky; the passionate Marina Tsvetayeva, a feminist icon; Osip Mandelstam, considered Pushkin’s heir, who perished in the gulag alongside countless others. Those who survived grieved—and none with more dignity and eloquence than Anna Akhmatova. Unpublished and destitute—all the men close to her were killed or otherwise victimized by Stalin’s terror—Akhmatova spent most of her creative life mourning St. Petersburg. She was her city’s Cassandra, its Keening Muse, as her disciple Joseph Brodsky described her.

It’s raining as we make our way through the sodden courtyard of Fountain House. The Soviets carved up this wing of the former Sheremetyevo palace, on the Fontanka River, into overcrowded communal apartments, where, from 1924 to 1952, Akhmatova shuffled about a small set of rooms. They’re now her movingly curated museum. Tall, regal, with a ballerina’s neck and a Roman emperor’s profile, Akhmatova was so stunning that visual and poetic tributes to her make up a subgenre of Russian studies. A copy of a sketch of her by Modigliani hangs on the walls of the monastically sparse room she called her own. Aside from the sketch, she owned virtually nothing.

In this room—a desk, a narrow bed, a few books—Akhmatova had her epic all-night encounter with a young Isaiah Berlin that got her denounced by the state and sent her son to prison again. Through her rainy window, we now look down at the bench from which the KGB watched her while she was under house arrest. On her desk sits the ashtray that has brought me to tears. Knowing that the apartments was bugged, Akhmatova and her friend and biographer Lydia Chukovskaya devised a scheme. Uttering trivialities in a loud voice—“Autumn is so early this year”—Akhmatova would scribble her new poem in pencil, and Chukovskaya would memorize the lines. Then they’d set the page on fire in the ashtray. 

“Hands, matches, an ashtray,” Chukovskaya wrote. “A ritual beautiful and bitter.” We leave in silence, carrying our tears out into the rain.

The first full edition of Akhmatova’s works wasn’t published in Russia until the 1980s. But by the time I was growing up, in the ’70s, she was acquiring a cult following. My aunt Yulia knew her and brought us a record of her reading Requiem. Mother would put it on in the dark, and I’d fall asleep to the sound of Akhmatova’s low, dignified voice and distilled classic rhymes. Her verses annealed suffering with nobility.

I also remember another voice from those nights—an angry voice, bringing Nabokov’s name to my hearing for the first time. A family fight was flaring up behind the tightly shut kitchen door of our house. My pro-Soviet grandmother screamed in outrage while my parents were explaining why this book that she called “muck” was great literature. Don’t mention the book to anyone, or we’ll get arrested, Mother warned me. I promptly stole the smuggled samizdat volume, read it cover to cover, and, being nine, had no clue what the fuss was about. Lolita, the book was called.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in exile while the “hospitable, remorseful, racemosa-blossoming Russia” that his family fled in 1917 was replaced by a Russia that was busily banning his work. But Nabokov, too, has been rehabilitated in his homeland. In 1997 the mansion where he spent his cosseted childhood was turned into a museum. The building seems to have changed little since Nabokov described it as “a stylish Italianate construction of pink Finnish granite built by my grandfather circa 1885, with floral frescoes above the third (upper) story and a second-floor oriel.” Sundry Nabokoviana, donated by the writer’s son, Dmitry, and various Western institutions, takes up Nabokov’s former foyer, library, dining room, and vast meeting hall, all ornate and reeking of affluence. Among the most memorable objects: Nabokov’s butterfly net and lepidoptera collection, and his Scrabble set with S-P-E-A-K M-E-M-O-R-Y spelled out on the board. Me, I would also like to have seen the Rolls-Royce that took young Vladimir to school every morning.

Actually, I’m too starstruck to concentrate on Nabokov’s pince-nez, because during our visit the museum is hosting a glamorous conference on the work of another writer: the ’60s-era novelist Andrei Bitov, whom I happen to love. One of his best-known works, set in Leningrad, is a hyperliterary meta-novel called—what else?—Pushkin House. The septuagenarian author is holding court under the fanciful carved wooden ceiling of the library where Nabokov’s father took fencing lessons. Around him Russia’s greatest surviving literati are munching Oreos and drinking Nescafé from plastic cups. What’s everyone talking about?

Why, Pushkin, of course. 

For St. Petersburg by the book, Moscow's endangered constructivist buildings, and other diversions in both cities, click here. "Pushkin Is Our Everything" originally appeared in the January/February 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from Culture+Travel available on ARTINFO, click here.