Sennaya Square

This guide to Sennaya Square in Saint Petersburg opens with a scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, a man dropping to kiss the ground as a crowd jeers, and traces it back to the real square the writer knew as the roughest patch of the city. You'll hear how an eighteenth-century hay and cattle market grew into a bazaar of peddlers, thieves and public floggings, and how cholera riots broke out here in 1831. A blue-domed church raised by merchants in the 1750s once watched over it all. Listen while standing at the square's center, where the crowd in Dostoevsky's scene would have gathered.