Travel Notes

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.