Introduction to Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg

Welcome to the Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg website, where Dostoevsky, digital humanities and undergraduate research come together in an encyclopedia plotted onto a period map of the city where Dostoevsky lived and created.

Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg highlights the interaction between physical and artistic/intellectual spaces in Dostoevsky’s novels and explores the concept of literary topography by showing how the geography and artistic history of Russia’s imperial capital intermingle.

All of the encyclopedia entries were written and researched by senior undergraduate students in Dr. Megan Swift’s “Existence and Anxiety in Dostoevsky” class at the University of Victoria.

This project is a work-in-progress as students continue to add layers to the map.

This website was created by Dr. Megan Swift along with lead programmer Martin Holmes and encoder Joey Takeda at the University of Victoria in 2015.

Our implementation of the St. Petersburg Map is based on the OpenLayers 3.0 library. It presents the map as a zoomable, rotatable tiled image with locations plotted on it. In the default view, the locations are initially hidden; you can show them by checking checkboxes in the navigation panel which appears at the top right of the map. Locations in the navigation panel are sorted into categories; click on a category name to expand it and see all the locations. Some locations appear in more than one category.

Interacting with the map

Zoom in and out using the scroll wheel on your mouse, or the zoom control at the top left.
Rotate the map using the rotate button at the top left, or by holding down the Shift key and dragging up and down with your mouse.
Change the map opacity using the range control at the bottom left.

Apart from this, these are the main things you will want to do with the map:

Find one or more specific locations and show them

This is best done by searching in the navigation panel. Click on the Search button in the caption bar, and then type all or part of a name, and press the return key. Only locations whose names match your search term will be shown. Check the checkboxes for the locations you want to show, then click the target symbol on the right of the location name to zoom the map into that location. When you have finished searching, click the Search button again to go back to the normal view which shows all the locations.

You can also search for a @xml:id value in the search box, so if you happen to know the id of a location, but not its name, you can find it quickly that way.

Look at one specific type of location

If this is a small category, such as Taverns, you can simply check the checkbox next to the category caption in the navigation panel and turn them all on. However, if it’s a large category (such as Streets), the result may be overwhelming.

Examine a specific area of the map

This is best done by holding down the Control key on your keyboard and dragging a box around the area with your mouse; the map will zoom into that area, and all the locations in that area will be shown. If you’re only interested in a subset of the locations in that area, you can turn off the categories that don’t interest you in the navigation panel.

Bookmark what you see

If you have shown a selection of locations, and you would like to return to those locations with the map zoomed in to show them as large as possible:

Make sure only the locations you want are showing; uncheck any others in the navigation panel to hide them.
Click on the Bookmark button on the toolbar.

Your browser will be forwarded to a new URL which encodes the instructions for showing these locations. You can bookmark that URL and return to it any time.

Create an image of what you see

Click on the Picture button on the toolbar to take an image shapshot of the map (not including the toolbar, location panel and popups). A PNG image will be created, which you can download or open directly. Note: this will fail on one or two browsers at the time of writing, because they do not yet support the HTML5 @download attribute. It this happens to you, try a more modern browser such as Chrome or Firefox.