By Whitney Eggers, Production Dramaturg

"The most abstract and premeditated city in the whole world."
—Dostoevsky

St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703, in what was at the time a Finnish swampland. Built as a “Window to the West” by the highly European, avidly modernizing Tsar, St. Petersburg symbolized the historic schism between old-Russian Slavophiles and the Europe-idolizing Westernizers. A modern historical marvel, St. Petersburg became the capital of Russia until the Revolution of 1917, and was both the seat of the monarchy and the scene of some of Russia’s most abject poverty. The term “Petersburg Misery” came to connote the peculiar dreamy unhappiness and ideological dichotomy of “The Europe of Russia.”

From St. Petersburg: Russia’s Window to the Future,
The First Three Centuries, by Arthur L. George:

“When Dostoevsky was exiled in 1849, the capital still had the aristocratic and orderly imperial sheen of Pushkin’s Petersburg. But within two decades the city was beset with the blights of the early industrial revolution already familiar in the West, only made worse by Russian conditions and Petersburg’s location and climate. Growing numbers of the proletariat labored in the city’s belching factories, lived in crowded tenements and cellars, and were ravaged by disease….

“This is a city of half-crazy people…. There are few places where you’ll find so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of a man as in Petersburg.”
—Crime and Punishment

Industrialization and the influx of factory workers and others from the countryside resulted in classic Dickensian urban blight and hardship which at first was beyond the ability of city authorities to control. The aristocratic and imperial city became more than ever one of contrasts. Side by side with imperial magnificence stood pollution, labor abuses, atrocious living conditions, vice, and disease. Haymarket Square, the inner city’s pit of squalor and vice made so famous by Dostoevsky, lay right in the center of town…. ‘In that neighborhood,’ wrote Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, ‘nothing could surprise anybody. Close to the Haymarket, thick with whorehouses, it swarmed with a population of tradesmen and jacks-of-all-trades who combined to make those central streets of Petersburg flash with a panorama in which almost nothing or nobody could cause any surprise.’

…Around the Haymarket in 1869 on average 247 people lived in each house. Such numbers were achieved by stuffing tenants into attics, closets, below staircases, and in cellars. As the shortage worsened, slumlords built or converted whole buildings into large dormitories consisting only of rows of bunks reminiscent of a prison camp. Even these spaces were leased out in shifts during the day and night so that the same bunk would be occupied by two or three people in the course of 24 hours…. But many people were simply homeless, and so doss-houses became common. 

“Petersburg is the touchstone of a man: whoever, living in it, has not been carried away by the whirlpool of phantom life, has managed to keep both heart and soul but not at the expense of common sense, to preserve his human dignity without falling into quixoticism—to him you can boldly extend your hand as to a man.
—Vissarion Belinsky

Another blight was pollution. Discharges from factories and human wastes poured into the Neva and the canals, which were still the source of most residents’ drinking water and which one foreign visitor termed ‘perfectly pestiferous.’ Public notices warned residents not to drink unboiled water…. Excrement and garbage piled up in the city’s courtyards and alleys and was only irregularly removed, while waste from outhouses and latrines penetrated water supplies and houses. Meanwhile, hundreds of smokestacks spewed smoke and ash into the air which settled on the surrounding territory. When the wind was still, a yellowish-gray pall hung over the city.

The combination of climate, poor housing conditions, bad diet, and pollution soon gave St. Petersburg the unenviable distinction of being the unhealthiest large city in Europe, with the highest death rate. Diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhus, syphilis, and alcoholism were rampant and by the late 1860s accounted for one-half of all deaths in the city….

“The heat in the streets was stifling. The stuffiness, the jostling crowds, the bricks and mortar, scaffolding and dust everywhere, and that peculiar summer stench so familiar to everyone who cannot get away from St. Petersburg into the country, all combined to aggravate the disturbance of the young man’s nerves. The intolerable reek from the public houses, so numerous in that part of the city, and the sight of the drunken men encountered at every turn, even though this was not a holiday, completed the mournfully repellent picture.”
—Crime and Punishment

In this atmosphere, crime and vice reached crisis proportions and public morals deteriorated. By 1866, the number of crimes resulting in arrest and confinement had reached 130,000 per year, nearly one person in four. Drunkenness became a bane of the city, whose per capita consumption of vodka was the highest anywhere in Russia…. Prostitution was legal and flowered. The number of registered prostitutes first exceeded 2,000 in 1868 but by the end of 1870 already exceeded 4,400; the real figure including unregistered prostitutes was far higher. By the end of the 1860s, one-fourth of the births in the city were illegitimate.”