At ten past nine on the evening of the 27th of May 2025, the sun slips quietly behind the rooftops of Vasilyevsky Island, off to the north-north-west, just beside the Gazprom tower that Petersburgers call the corncob. I am standing on the Blagoveshchensky Bridge. Raskolnikov stood here too.
Why this is his light
He stood here in July, and I am here in May, which ought to spoil everything. It does not, and the reason is a piece of arithmetic pleasing enough to be worth setting out.
Sunset does not merely happen later in summer; it happens further north along the horizon, swinging round to its extreme at the solstice and back again. Which means the azimuth of a sunset is not a function of the date but of the distance from the 21st of June—and dates equidistant from the solstice, one before and one after, put the sun down in almost precisely the same spot.
Late May and mid-July are such a pair. That evening’s sun was setting where the July sun of Crime and Punishment set: same bearing, same angle, same slant of light along the same stretch of water.
There is a further twist, and it is the sort of thing this department exists for. Russia kept the Julian calendar until 1918, and the gap between the two calendars is not fixed—it widens by a day each century that is not a leap year. Today it is thirteen days. In Dostoevsky’s century it was twelve. So that evening, by the reckoning the novel itself used, was the 15th of May: a date I should have got wrong by a day had I subtracted the modern thirteen.
What he actually saw
Not this. The far bank in the photograph is a nineteenth-century idea of the future that arrived late: the domes over there went up decades after the novel, and the tower, of course, is ours. Strip them out and you are left with a low, grey, unremarkable Petersburg skyline and a river going flat under the light.
Which is the point. The sun Raskolnikov saw simply hung over the embankment—then the Nikolaevskaya, now Lieutenant Schmidt—above nothing in particular.
And this bridge, then called the Nikolaevsky, is where Dostoevsky put one of the strangest scenes in the book. Raskolnikov stops in the middle of it and looks at the panorama, and the panorama gives him nothing: the magnificence is mute, the splendour deaf, a spirit he cannot hear. Then a coachman’s whip catches him across the back for standing in the road, and a merchant’s wife, taking him for a beggar, presses a twenty-kopeck piece into his hand. He walks on and drops the coin into the Neva.
That is the moment he cuts the last thread. Not the murder—the coin.
The sun in the novel
Dostoevsky, who knew a good deal about light arriving suddenly and meaning too much, does not use the sun for scenery.
It is Porfiry Petrovich who says the thing everybody remembers: Be the sun, and all will see you. Not advice about ambition—an instruction to stop hiding. The sun’s whole business, Porfiry adds, is to be the sun.
And when the light finally does something for Raskolnikov, it is not here. It is at the very end, in Siberia, on the bank of a wide river, with the steppe running out to the horizon and the sun on it: the first thing in eight hundred pages that he looks at without calculating.
Petersburg gets the sun that hangs over an embankment. Siberia gets the sun that means something. The city that made him is lit, and the light does nothing at all.
The only unrestored prop
Which leaves this. Everything on that horizon has been rebuilt, renamed or added: the bridge has had three names, the embankment two, the skyline a tower and some domes. The one element in the frame that no one has touched is the light—the same star at the same bearing on the same day of a calendar we no longer keep.
You cannot visit 1865. But you can, for about four minutes in late May, stand in its light.
