«Век пароходов и железных дорог»: какими путями Ф. М. Достоевский добирался до Старой Руссы
“The Age of Steamships and Railways”: The Routes Fyodor Dostoevsky Used to Reach Staraya Russa

Summary/Abstract: The article reconstructs the routes Fyodor Dostoevsky and his family took on their annual trips from St. Petersburg to Staraya Russa in 1872–1876 and 1878–1880. Drawing on published and unpublished letters from the Dostoevsky archive, memoirs, notebooks, notes by the writer’s widow, and travel guides from the second half of the 19th century, the authors provide a comprehensive account of the family’s travels. The main routes are traced in detail: by rail (St. Petersburg — Chudovo — Volkhovskaya) and by water (steamboats along the Volkhov River and across Lake Ilmen to Staraya Russa), as well as alternative routes taken when the rivers became too shalow — through the villages of Ustrika, Zvad, and Krivoye Koleno. Anna Dostoevskaya’s notes to her husband’s letters are introduced into scholarly circulation for the first time. These notes reveal, for example, that in February 1875 Dostoevsky crossed the frozen Lake Ilmen in winter, and that he departed from Staraya Russa for the Pushkin celebrations on May 22, 1880, at seven in the evening, arriving in Moscow a day later. The study demonstrates how everyday travel experiences were transformed in the writer’s work. Observations of passengers on trains and steamships formed the basis for the essay “Little Pictures (on the Road),” and the ancient village of Ustrika became the prototype for Ustyevo in the novel “Demons” — the place where Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky died. The episode of the protagonist’s delay in Ustyevo not only reveals the novel’s evangelical subtext but also helps date Dostoevsky’s actual journey through Ustrika to 1872. Even after the opening of the Staraya Russa — Novgorod railway in 1878, the Dostoevsky family did not completely abandon water travel, but it was the train that took the writer to Optina Monastery and the Pushkin Festival — events that would prove pivotal to his later work (“The Brothers Karamazov,” his Pushkin Speech). Dostoevsky’s phrase “the age of steamships and railways” is understood not only as a metaphor for the era, but also as a reflection of his personal experience, in which technology and faith, separations and reunions defined the writer’s creative and family biography.

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