The Faberge Museum, opened in 2013, is one of Saint Petersburg’s newest. Privately owned by Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg’s The Link of Times Foundation, this museum displays lost art and artifacts that have been repatriated back to Russia thanks, in large part, to the tech tycoon’s wealth. One of the many tragedies stemming from Russia’s […]

Alexander Blok’s former apartment is now part of a two-floor museum complex. Blok was one of Russia’s primer Silver Age poets, and his museum shows not only how he worked, but also gives some indication of the emotionally extreme but also socially well-connected life he led. The museum is located in the historic Kolomna district […]

The Literary Museum of the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences is often just called “The Pushkin House” for short. It provides, essentially, an overview course on Russian canonical writers from the Golden Age through the end of Russia’s Silver Age. It achieves this by displaying original manuscripts and personal belongings […]

Vladimir Sharov was a Russian writer who was deeply interested in the legacy of Russia’s Communist history. His nine novels focus on various aspects of this history: the communist schisms, Bolshevism, Stalin’s Terror, and the USSR’s collapse, and often mixes or juxtaposes ideas from Communism and religion. Russia’s Soviet history was deeply personal to Sharov, […]

Nikolai Nekrasov is one of Russia’s most famous poets and literary thinkers. While he is not as recognized abroad as some of his contemporaries like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, Nekrasov was a great influence on their careers as well as to as to the intellectual thought of the time that affected many of these great […]

The Dostoevsky Memorial Apartment Museum at 5/2 Kuzneckny Pereulok in St. Petersburg is dedicated to drawing a picture of the great Russian writer as a person with a focus on his work habits, on his concerns, and particularly on his family life. Even discussion of his greatest novels is presented within the context of telling […]

Victor Pelevin, the cult author of such postmodernist classics as Oman Ra and Generation P, does not appear often in public and very rarely gives interviews. When he does, they are usually done over the internet. Pelevin’s published works, fortunately, speak for themselves. His novels are often multi-layered texts fusing elements of pop culture with […]

Located on Kotlin Island, some 20 miles west of Saint Petersburg, the city of Kronstadt and surrounding fortifications are grouped under the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.” Much of the island is currently being reconstructed as a major tourist center focused on Russia’s naval history. A […]

Just over a hundred years ago the October Revolution began in Saint Petersburg, Russia, then known as Petrograd and at the time the nation’s capital, an event that would influence the world for much of the 20th century. This revolution that would eventually lead to the establishment of the Soviet Union began with a shot […]