Nevsky Avenue

This guide to Nevsky Avenue centers on Nikolai Gogol's 1835 tale Nevsky Prospekt, set on the very street stretching in front of you, about a young painter named Piskarev who falls for a beautiful stranger he glimpses one evening and trails her home, certain she is a lady of quality. It follows Pirogov, another character in the same tale, and his own reckless night on this avenue chasing another man's wife. The guide also traces how the avenue itself, cut dead straight through the marshland by monks under Peter the Great, came to be finished around seventeen eighteen.