The Literary Cafe
Ground zero for Pushkinphiles, this café—formerly Wolf and Berange—was the writer’s last stop en route to that fateful duel. His kitschy wax figure greets you in the little downstairs lobby. Though service can be infuriatingly slow, raise a glass of spiced mead to the national poet as locals gossip about his love life.
Nevsky Prospekt , 18
78-12/312-6057

Stolle
Piroghi—pies—are the theme at this neo-vintage café decorated with black-and-white images of the city. Line up by the counter for slabs of fluffy yeast dough filled with cabbage, rabbit, or apples and lingonberries.
Konyshenniy
Pereulok, 1–6
78-12/312-1862

Stray Dog
In the Silver Age 1910s, Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, and Mayakovsky all performed at this vaulted cellar, then the city’s preeminent literary cabaret. Now there are historical photographs in the back rooms and a fetching collection of dog objects made by various artists up front. Refuel with Slavic staples like pelmeni (Siberian dumplings) or borscht.
Ploscahd Isskustv, 5–4
78-12/303-8821

U Gorchakova
In the former mansion of Prince Gorchakov, Pushkin’s lycée friend, this merry, stylized place has a menu written in doting 19th-century prose. The kitchen ably covers all the basics, and the thick, bracing soups are especially fine.
Bolshaya
Monetnaya , 17–19
78-12/233-9272

 

Tour:
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Read:
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837)
His prime Piter works: narrative poem The Bronze Horseman, novel in verse Eugene Onegin, and Gothic short story “The Queen of Spades.”

Nikolai Gogol (1808–1852)
St. Petersburg Tales, Nevsky Prospekt, and The Overcoat present the city as a haunted, phantasmagoric place.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
Key St. Petersburg works: White Nights, Notes from the Underground, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment.

Anna Akhmatova (1888–1966)
Requiem and Poem Without a Hero are her monuments to the city.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
Speak, Memory: memoir of his Russian past.

Andrei Bitov (1937–)
Densely layered Leningrad-set Pushkin House is a bit Proustian, a little Nabokovian.

Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996)
In Less Than One, read the tribute to Akhmatova and the meditation on Piter titled “A Guide to a Renamed City.”

 

Moscow Modern

Life is full of roads not taken, and I missed the chance of a lifetime to explore the rich legacy of Constructivist architecture during a two-week stay in Moscow in 1974. I was there as an official guest, selecting movies for presentation at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and on my first free day I wanted to see some of the city. After the obligatory tour of the Kremlin and other historic landmarks, I asked my translator for a personal recommendation and she took me to the Museum of Architecture. We were the only visitors, and I was able to leaf through scrapbooks of work by modernist pioneers of the 1920s. Their names were unfamiliar, but the buildings and unrealized designs were astonishing. Each of the books ended abruptly in the early 1930s—around the time that Stalin decided that modernism was too rarefied for the masses and lacked the pomp and ceremony to glorify a dictatorship. Progressive ideas in all the arts were brutally suppressed, and most of the architects died in obscurity.

In the car, the driver (probably a KGB agent) was plainly upset by this detour from the familiar itinerary, and when I asked to see Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin apartments, a forgotten masterpiece of 1930, I hit a wall: “Nyet! So sorry, not possible. We return now to hotel.” The next weekend, we flew to Tbilisi, Georgia, where I saw a building—the Ministry of Highways—that took my breath away. Cantilevered wings spread wide from a hillside. It looked like a visionary design of 1924 but was newly completed, the last gasp of Constructivism in this remote republic.