Sobor Svyatoy Zhivonachal'noy Troitsy

This guide to Trinity Cathedral in Saint Petersburg opens in 1866, with a young stenographer named Anna Snitkina taking dictation through the night for Fyodor Dostoevsky, racing to finish a novel before a predatory publisher's deadline could claim everything he had written. It follows the marriage that grew out of those weeks of work, held right here under the blue and gold domes in February 1867, and the fourteen years of partnership that began that day. The guide also traces the cathedral itself back to Nicholas I, who ordered it built for his Imperial Guard with room for three thousand worshippers beneath one of Europe's largest wooden domes.