Aslaug and I have made an extraordinary discovery. Last night - a Friday night, we were both more or less exhausted after the week of classes and assorted questions and crises with the students - we decided to have a walkabout in our neighborhood. Aslaug has decided (following my example) to buy shoes, I'm thinking about a winter coat. Our neighborhood, as you already know, seems to be the epicenter of footwear commerce in St. Petersburg, and is also fairly well-endowed with zhenskaia odezhda (women's clothing) stores. So out we went.

After an hour and a half of high heels and puffy jackets (at one boutique for some reason the salesclerk took a shining to Aslaug, and kept bringing her assorted baggy sweaters, none of which were flattering. I think maybe she decided Aslaug was the one with money) we were hungry, and decided to check out the Czech beer restaurant - pivnoi restoran - on the corner of the block where we live. Pleasant if smokey atmosphere, several tables of friends gathered at the end of the work week, two women in their 40's enjoying a night out, and us. Hockey on the TV, excellent pilsner, sausages and kraut for me, a pork steak for Aslaug. Contented and with full stomachs, we headed home.

And coming out of the Czech beer place, what should we see across the street but one of the myriad "memorial plaques" that coat the city - a plaque I've walked by numerous times but in the other direction, so I didn't see it. And lo and behold, in this house that's adjacent to the house we're living in, Dostoevsky lived for two years, in the early 1840's. Didn't just live here but became a writer here: it was in this little corner house, one of the new dokhodnye doma (apartment blocks) that were being built in increasing numbers throughout the city, that he wrote his first work, Poor Folk.

This delights me, for many reasons. Dostoevsky is the great poet visionary of this city, after all, the one whose insights into human character and the dynamics of social interactions still seem so compelling. I think of him frequently here - particularly when I encounter the down-and-out, the dispossessed, the raggedy, reeling drunks and their motley companions. Last summer when David and I were here we stopped to have supper one evening at an outdoor cafe on Sennaia ploshchad - Haymarket Square - the formerly seedy center of "Dostoevsky's Petersburg." Now it's been cleaned up and made into a commercial center, with small kiosks and a big mall and numerous mid-level stores. We sat at our cafe and had a pleasant simple supper of soup and bread, and when I'd almost finished my soup - the bowl still had perhaps a half a cup of broth and vegetables in it - a towering man in a dirty overcoat, with an unkempt beard and an unsteady gait, approached our table, picked up my bowl, and drank it down. Once I got over my shock, and realized that he had no intentions of harming me in any way - he was just very hungry and had thought I was finished - I ran into the cafe, bought a pirozhok (little pie) and ran off after him, to give him something more to eat. The whole scene - the invasion of "my" space (I'd paid for it, after all), the towering unkempt figure from another world, the sudden impulsive compassion (one of those irrational acts that utilitarians in Dostoevsky's novel heap scorn upon) - seemed to me (and still seems) to come straight out of the pages of his novels. The streets of this city can still seem, at any moment, to be those pages. He saw very deeply into the realities of the modern world, and of modern cities in particular. Petersburg's unpredictability, its refusal to keep categories in place, its constant provision of spectacular crossings of boundaries: all of that is straight out of Dostoevsky.

But the other reason that this memorial plaque just at our corner so delights me, is that I have spent the last few weeks remembering the very work that Dostoevsky wrote here: I've been thinking of that first novel, Poor Folk, and its unobtrusive-to-a-fault "hero", Makar Devushkin.

Devushkin is one of the previously nameless and faceless "little men" of the Imperial Bureaucracy, whose inner life is given voice in a series of letters he writes to a woman who lives across the courtyard. She writes back. He falls in love. He declares himself but is ultimately bested by someone of higher rank and greater fortune. The little epistolary novel ends with disappointment in love and a despairing glance into a future that seems to promise little.

So even before I realized that Dostoevsky had lived virtually in this very courtyard (how I wish I could erase that virtually!), I had been looking across our courtyard at the windows opposite, wondering about the lives of the people who live there, trying to discern from the plants in the window, the lace curtains, the hours of their lights on and lights off, just who these folk might be: poor, rich, young, old? Reading the frames of the windows (newly installed replacement windows with their bright white frames might suggest people of some means); the bits of newspaper stuffed between the double frames of the lower windows - suggesting on the contrary people of modest or no means, trying to keep out the winter drafts. In the early warmer days of our stay, the top windows were always left open, and on one day I was convinced that the owners of the top floor apartment had acquired some exotic animal, which spent its afternoons preening its neck out toward the sun. It turned out to be the long leaf of a potted plant, swaying in the wind. And now it has its long neck turned away from light and air, flattened by the outer window that the inhabitants have decided to keep shut, as October brings chillier mornings and grayer skies.

I have been living in Dostoevsky's courtyard all this time, watching the windows of these people who are my "neighbors" but whose lives I do not know, about whom I can only guess. A shadow of an older woman, seeming to touch some black frame on a far wall, her back turned to me. Is she sewing? Is she cleaning something? Is there some other person there whom I can't see, who she's talking to? The city gives us questions and no answers. I start to become like those other characters in Dostoevsky, dreamers who think up stories for people whose actual lives they will never know.

And when I walk down the street this morning to put money on my mobile phone (instrument of communication with people who live elsewhere, not across my courtyard), who do I see when I'm coming back but Mr. Marmeladov, the father of the prostitute from Crime and Punishment, swaying slowly along the pavement of Vladimirsky Prospekt, weaving his way over to the wall to steady his progress. He doesn't have hay in his hair; he doesn't seem to have slept on a barge in the Fontanka; but he's drunk at 10:00 in the morning, unshaven and unkempt, with a backpack looking incongruously athletic or collegiate, as though he's setting off for a Saturday hike.

When we first came to Petersburg students were struck - and repulsed - by these Dostoevskian shadows on the city's streets. Drunks and the down-and-out, dirty and homeless, people who seem to have given up what small measure of hope they ever had. Dostoevsky's great and fundamentally Christian impulse is always to see these folk with the eyes of compassion, and often with humor, an impulse connected to forgiveness, and humility. He brings them across the thresholds of our own privileged and protected lives, into our oh-so-jealously guarded private space, so that they drink our soup, tell us stories, show us their faces and remind us of their own complex humanity, and our own.