★ Combines two out-of-print classics, re-issued for the first time in a “merged and revised” form, a model of the scarce deep-reading urban-humanities genre.
★ Uses “immersive second-person” narration, letting readers enter Petersburg old houses as “tenants”, visiting intimate fragments of celebrities’ lives.
★ Involves cultural symbols highly famous in China—Pushkin, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Akhmatova—so that “celebrity memories” are activated in readers as “present bodily experience”.
★ All content is based on first-hand materials—letters, diaries, archival transcripts—ready for use in history-culture courses or city-walking lectures.
★ The author has received the “Anziferov Diploma”, awarded for outstanding contributions to St Petersburg local-history writing.

This book merges two long out-of-print Petersburg city writings—*The Window Speaker: Petersburg Old Houses as Witnesses of Fate* and *A Mirror Journey through Petersburg: Diving into History*—into a single reprint! From page one you will witness secret events inside Petersburg house walls—intimate fragments of celebrities’ lives. The author retains the “moving scenery” narrative style: first giving current architectural details, then switching back to real life in the same space in the 18th–20th centuries. Readers follow stairs or corridors into ten locations: a flat on Morskaya Street, a music apartment near Nevsky Prospect, the Fountain House gardens… You are not a tourist onlooker but an “invited guest of the house”.
- You will climb the back stairs of the Morskaya Street house just as Pushkin did to visit Gogol.
- You will admire the view of Nevsky Prospect through the window of Tchaikovsky’s house, where the composer once chatted with his best friend, philanthropist Nadezhda von Meck.
- You will stroll the alleys of the Fountain Palace gardens with Anna Akhmatova, where the poet wrote her *Requiem*. …
Writer Yekaterina Kubryakova’s touching retellings of these and other 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century Petersburg social-life scenes bring others’ memories alive in the reader and transform them into personal experience, creating a model work!

【Author】Yekaterina Kubryakova
Native Petersburg writer, founder of the city-history blog “Window Speaker”, devoted to preserving Petersburg history, and also a writer and playwright. In 2019 she was awarded the Anziferov Diploma for her continuing contribution to contemporary Petersburg local-history studies.