Dostoyevsky connoisseurs can now visit a museum dedicated to the great novelist’s arguably most important work, The Brothers Karamazov.
Located in the town of Staraya Russa, where the writer spent his summers over the course of eight years, the museum is part of the existing Dostoyevsky Center on the second floor of a nineteenth-century mansion. There, visitors are invited to draw parallels between the locales of the Novgorod Oblast town and its literary counterpart in the novel, in which it goes by the decidedly less romantic name Skotoperegonyevsk (literally, “Cattledriveville”).
The exposition covers six rooms, each decorated in the style of one of the novel’s characters. The museum is located about seven minutes from the house where Dostoyevsky actually lived in Staraya Russa, which his daughter once said was a copy of Fyodor Karamazov’s dacha.
Russia’s Bikin River valley is the newest Russian addition to the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites. The territory, located in Primorye and Khabarovsk Krais in the Russian Far East, sits north of an existing protected territory and spans some 1,160,469 hectares.
The pristine land includes dark coniferous forest and is populated by species like the Amur tiger, the Siberian musk deer, wolverine and sable. The area has no roads, and the few tourists who visit are brought in by helicopter to admire the area’s beauty (and sometimes to fish).
The Russian Duma has voted to allow football fans with a Fan ID (issued by FIFA to attend the 2018 World Cup in Russia) to return to Russia visa free before the end of the year.
Previously, President Vladimir Putin had said it would be a good idea to encourage tourism after the successful championship by issuing free visas to family members of World Cup fans. Some 650,000 people received Fan ID documents this year, which were required to attend football matches.
The main city in the Russian Far East, Vladivostok, has opened a new five-star hotel. The Lotte Hotel Vladivostok is the fourth hotel managed by the Lotte Group in Russia. It is also the only five-star accommodation in the Far East and is located 40 minutes from the Vladivostok airport, in the city center. It includes 153 rooms as well as three restaurants, a pool and a fitness center. Prices start at R14,500.
The Russian government has proposed new measures that may result in new fees for air travelers. A draft decree would strip wording from existing rules that say certain types of personal items – briefcases, handbags, coats and medical necessities like crutches, medicines and walking canes – are “supplementary” or exempt from carry-on rules and thus do not incur a fee. Stay tuned.
Russian archeologists have discovered the remains of a fourteenth-century church at the site of the former Sitetsky Monastery near Veliky Novgorod.
The monastery had fallen into ruin by the beginning of the twentieth century and was further destroyed by aerial bombing during World War II. By the time archaeologists began to work on the site, it was just a plot of uneven earth with shrubs and small trees.
The church of Andrei on Sitka was dedicated to Andrew of Constantinople, also known as Andrew the Fool-for-Christ.
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