I speak no Russian, and often found myself in situations in which no one spoke English. At popular tourist sites like the Hermitage, information in different languages is readily available; more niche gatherings like the Dostoyevsky festival, however, are geared toward the local populace, with explanations and accompanying literature in Russian (if available at all). I identified a couple of festival volunteers by their T-shirts and asked if they could help me understand the performance I had just witnessed, but was met with shy shrugs and apologies.

I had better luck with a map I got inside the old guardhouse from a friendly young guide. I was able to follow that down Sadovaya Street and up over the Kokushkin Bridge past one of Dostoevsky’s old apartments. (He was supposedly plagued by money problems and moved frequently.) After a few more blocks, I came to a small group of people listening to a tour guide outside an apartment building with a crumbling facade. This time, I had better luck communicating.

When I asked the tour guide (whose name happened to be Fyodor, coincidentally) if he could provide me with an English explanation, his girlfriend, Maria, swooped in to the rescue. “This is the Raskolnikov apartment,” she said, referring to the antihero of “Crime and Punishment.” But wasn’t he a fictional character? I asked. “Yes,” she replied, “But Dostoyevsky liked to use real-life places in his books.”

Indeed, the novel begins: “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.” The “K,” Russian historians eventually determined, meant Kokushkin, the name of the bridge I had just crossed. The “S” in question stood for Stolyarny, the street on which we now stood.