In Russia, courtyard gates are usually left open, but this one was locked. We slipped in behind an exiting car, and the driver yelled at us. After gazing at Raskolnikov’s entryway, we left the courtyard at the same time as a woman and her young daughter. The mother told Olesya the gate was locked because every day tour groups came by. Meanwhile an older Russian woman led eight high school students up to the gate and started pressing buttons. When the mother objected, the group broke up and drifted away. But by the time the woman and her daughter were down the block, the teacher was back with her flock of T-shirted and flanneled teenagers. As we moved on, they were buzzed in.

The area was poor when Dostoyevsky lived there, and the canals that surrounded it on three sides stank. I had reread the beginning of “Crime and Punishment” the night before, and part of the magic of looking at the place now was how it made you see through its middle-class present into its more rugged past. Thomas, Olesya and I retraced Raskolnikov’s footsteps on the day of the murder. When we walked into the somewhat dilapidated courtyard of the murdered pawnbroker, Olesya said: “Ah, this is more like the old yellow these buildings were painted. Sick dirty yellow. Asylums were always painted yellow. Dostoyevsky’s references to yellow immediately brought this to mind. In class they told us to count the yellows.”

Next was Moscow. In the Tolstoys’ 16-room winter house were many objects: books, a chess set, a piano, a tiger skin, a closet of clothes. On the landing an upright stuffed bear held a plate for visiting cards. Tolstoy was a man of obsessive enthusiasms. At the back of the house was a workroom with his cobbler tools, which he used to make shoes, including a pair for his oldest daughter Tatyana’s future husband. Next to it was his study, where he wrote by the light of a single candle and received the “common” people through the backstairs, which he also used to come and go unnoticed. Cater-cornered was the room of his valet, whose job was to take Tolstoy’s wife and children to balls, since Tolstoy refused to go.

Image Leo Tolstoy. Credit... Topical Press Agency/Getty Images

The Tolstoys moved there after his spiritual awakening. He and his wife, Sophia, were soon quarreling furiously over his desire to give his money to the peasants. Sophia wanted it for their children. Their compromise was rancorous. Their son Vanya, a prodigy who had already dictated a story published in a children’s magazine, died of scarlet fever at 6 at their home. By the end of Tolstoy’s life, the couple’s bedroom had been moved into a sort of foyer between the dining room and nursery.

Sophia preserved 6,000 objects for posterity, in homage to her husband’s genius.

After our visit Thomas said, “Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were on different paths to the same destination.” What was that, I wondered. “God, faith,” he said. “You choose the paths that match your brain. I prefer Dostoyevsky because that’s the way I think.”

He and I took the metro back to our hotel and got off at the Lenin Library stop. Waiting for us above ground was a statue of Dostoyevsky, bigger than life, grimly slouching, eyes cast down, tension in his legs and in the hand resting on his thigh.