First and foremost, be notified of an informative article in Neizvestnyi Dostoevskii (no.  2, 2019) giving details about Dostoevsky’s stay in Florence in 1868-69, by Giuseppi Astuto and Irina Dergacheva: по следам достоевского во флоренции.

In 1862 during Dostoevsky’s first visit, with Nikolai Strakhov, he stayed at a hotel then called the Switzerland (subsequently called Albergotto), in room #20 on the 3d floor.  The place is now called the “Room Mate Isabella” and Florence has plaqued the fact that George Eliot stayed here at some point (at the front door’s upper left). No sign of Dostoevsky, though, except in one’s mind (though not the mind of the nice, tired-looking reception man, and, I gather, those of most of the hotel guests). The location is quite fancy, on a street lined with Gucci and suchlike.  Post-COVID tourism has returned to Florence and one feels that the tourists are besieging the hotel people. I am no exception. But the nice lobby man perked up in a decorous professional manner when I mentioned a famous Russian writer, and he showed me the sitting room and even took my photo there.  As for where Dostoevsky stayed, it is daunting to track down the exact room, so I photographed a dark-looking door in  Dostoevskian St. Petersburg yellow. The lobby is, or feels like, three stories up, and the room is thereabouts, so there’s a bit of plausibility.  Though this could also be George Eliot’s room, or that of some other writer who was never discovered. Maybe there’s one in there now. Also relevant is a steep stairway leading down to the street. Along the way, if you are lucky, you may catch a glimpse of the lower half of a horse-carriage out the stairwell’s circular window  and you might, oh so briefly, blessedly, forget what century this is.

Florence pays more attention to the apartment on Via Guicciardini (across from the Pitti Palace) where Fedor and Anna stayed on his second visit to the city (1868-9)–rightfully, given that he completed the novel The Idiot here.

     

The nearby coffee is excellent, though the reading material falls well short of The Idiot. Hearts of scooter aficionados will quicken at the views, both onto the Piazza de Pitti from Dostoevsky’s front door and into the alleyway on the side.

     

It is reported (Strelsky, Dostoevsy in Florence) that there was a bookbinding and stationery shop right next to the front door, where Dostoevsky could buy his Idiot supplies, and that the shop still existed. It became a goal of mine to buy a pen and some paper there. A very tasteful website pops right up, Giannini Firenze 1856. with the necessary, matching shop name and address, No. 22. But despite pacing and peering (oddly) into windows, there was no stationery establishment in sight. Instead, a lovely little shop offering handcrafted items made in Florence (the things that sort of look like soccer balls are actually paper globes you can stick red pins in to show where you’ve been). In conversation with a perky young English-speaking clerk I learn that the shop has only been open 1 1/2 months, and before that, there was a stationery store there. So I bought a bookmark and a small Florence homemade craft item instead. The stationery shop was in business 160 years, right up to this summer. I did breathe some of its air.

One persistent fact about Dostoevsky is that he was always out of money. With Anna now pregnant and, as usual, the “check in the mail,” in the spring of 1869 they had move to less expensive lodgings, off the Mercato Nuovo (aka Mercato del Porcellino) for what would be a stifling hot summer, before they were finally able to leave August 3 for Dresden.  Piazza del Mercato Nuovo is actually very close to the Room Mate Isabella, but it has a more Dostoevskian feel to it, by which I mean bustling and chaotic, with an admixture of grime. I can also attest that it is extremely hot in July.

The bicentennial year (2021) itself feels like 200 years ago in emotional and psychological time. Dostoevsky was celebrated around the world, with conferences, publications, exhibits and monuments. It turns out that Florence, too, participated, contributing a photo of Lorenzo Gilberti’s stunning  Baptistery doors, which thrilled Dostoevsky, and which he often stopped to admire on his walks in Florence, to the Dostoevsky Literary Memorial Museum in St. Petersburg.  At one point the writer expressed a wish to have a photo of the doors, which he could put up in his home, so that wish has come true. The city also put up a Dostoevsky statue (a gift from Russia, by sculptor Aidin Zeinalov Florence statue), though it is nowhere near these landmarks. Instead one must learn about public transit and ride a bus out to the Parco dele Cascine, well outside the city center.

The park is spacious, and one encounters an occasional cyclist and dog walker but basically you are alone. There’s a 20-minute trek from the bus stop along a wide and extremely warm, I mean hot, walking path before the statue appears in the distance.

 

 

In my line of work, everything starts to feel like a metaphor eventually. The ball and chain–that’s an easy one.  Stand there quietly for a while, and you might hear a faint buzzing sound. Look up, and between Dostoevsky’s upraised collar and his bearded cheek, you will see a small, busy hornets’ nest. But what could it mean?  I wish there was someone here for me to ask, but, as is often the case, it’s just me and Fedor Mikhailovich.

I’m suspecting it has nothing to do with another scene, which also puzzled me, of a Florentine horse carriage carrying tourists into Limbo.