Selections from novels, letters, diaries, and memoirs trace the history of St. Petersburg from earliest times. First-hand accounts tell of the 1825 Decembrists refusing to accept Nicholas I as Tsar and being shot down in the snow in Senate Square ; the imprisonment of Dostoevsky and the duel that killed Pushkin ; and the storming of the Winter Palace by the crowd in 1917. Includes notes on the history, art, architecture and life in the city.