Biography | Fyodor Dostoevsky — The Brothers Karamazov Written in This Corner Flat

People credit a publisher's imprint and skip the rooms.

The last novel was written in a rented corner apartment.

On 5 October 1878 Old Style — 17 October New Style — the Dostoevskys moved into house 5/2 at the corner of Kuznechny Lane and Yamskaya Street, now Dostoevsky Street, opposite the Vladimir Icon church.

Anna Grigorievna's notebooks fix the date.

The writer had already lived in this same building for a few months in 1846, just after Poor Folk.

Thirty-two years later he came back as the author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and Demons, and as editor of A Writer's Diary.

The flat on the second floor had six rooms, a book closet, an entry, and a kitchen.

Seven windows looked onto Kuznechny Lane.

The study sat where the marble plaque is now.

Here, in 1879 and 1880, he finished The Brothers Karamazov.

The Pushkin speech of June 1880 was prepared from this desk as well.

The house belonged to the widow of the merchant Friedrich Klinkostrem.

It still stands.

In 1971, for the 150th anniversary of his birth, the Literary-Memorial Museum of F. M. Dostoevsky opened in the reconstructed apartment.

The study was rebuilt from a photograph taken after his death by the Petersburg photographer Voldemar Taube, and from Anna's memoirs.

This is a public museum, not a private residence.

The pin is the corner the family named in the October 1878 letter to his brother Nikolai.

Photo: Vasily Perov, portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1872, public domain, Tretyakov Gallery, via Wikimedia Commons