Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The picture of tsarist capital city in early works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is vividly ambiguous; on the one hand it is a metropolis vibrant with life, overawing with its lavishness and aspiring to be one of the most important cities of contemporary Europe and on the other hand – the place full of social contrasts, the poor, shabby-looking, black low-rise tenement houses. In fact, such cramped and gloomy houses are dwelled by them – humble, obsessive about their passions and extremely impoverished office workers of Saint Petersburg. This article is an attempt of detailed analysis of Petersburg life phenomena, from a sociological and social perspective, presented in Dostoyevsky’s works before 1848.