Location
The Bronze Horseman on Dekabrist Square, near the river Neva
Nevsky Prospect, the main boulevard, St. Petersburg
Pushkin-Museum, Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki 12, St. Petersburg
Dostoevsky Memorial Museum, Kuznechny Pereulok 5/2, St. Petersburg
Joseph Brodsky Museum, Liteiny Prospect 24/27, apt. 28, entrance from Pestelya, St. Petersburg

Content
St. Petersburg is the topic of Andrey Bely in his avant-garde novel Petersburg published in 1922, where Bely develops the thought that Petersburg is nothing but a phantom and its importance lies only in the fact that it is the residency of a border country between East and West.

Pushkin's poem The Bronze Horseman, written at the beginning of the 19 th century contains the famous lines so often quoted about the window towards Europe. The poet speaks of St Petersburg, the Venice of the North, rising from the marshes.

The fact that Russia had achieved access to the Baltic Sea was received enthusiastically by the monarch, his people and later also by the poets. Pushkin's poem is dedicated to the man “whose word, like the power of destiny, has founded the city under the sea.”

Petersburg had been constructed as a Russian outpost on the Baltic Sea. However, the focal point of city life was not the coast. The prosperous residents of St Petersburg did not build their houses on the coast. At the beginning of the 19 th century, the Strelka, the point of Vasilievsky Island, emerged as a distinctive landmark, featuring the stock exchange crowned with the figure of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, and rostral columns serving as lighthouses. This was an international harbour equipped with all the attributes and symbols befitting its status. The first trading ship from Holland docked here. The quays were piled with goods. But the harbour lay in the middle of the capital and not on the sea coast.

In today's Petersburg the The Bronze Horseman (the statue of Peter the Great on horseback) stands as a monument for Pushkin in the middle of the city, not far from the Nevsky Prospect, the main boulevard, that was the main topic of Nikolai Gogol's Petersburg Tales.

On the Nevsky Prospect, behind the German church, there is a passage to German Petri-Schule where Swedish speaking Petersburg poet Edith Södergran (1892 – 1923) went to school during the years 1902-1908.

Petersburg is the city in which Dostoevsky spent most of his life and in which he wrote most of his writings. During 28 years he rented more than 20 apartments. A lot of houses in St. Petersburg are linked with Dostoevsky in a peculiar way: he 'lodged' his characters in them. The writer's own life was thus intermingled with the lives of the heroes in his novels. In Dostoevsky's novels the central focus is on Petersburg's essential element, the water. The Neva with its canals plays an important role in his works, and we often find his heroes staring spellbound into the black depths. Petersburg emerged a long way from the sources of the Russian national mentality, and Dostoevsky called it “the world's most fictitious city”. The scene of each Dostoevsky's novel is usually laid in the vicinity of the apartment the writer was renting at the time. Having finished a novel Dostoevsky could no longer stay in the area 'inhabited' by the 'worked-out' characters. In the case of Crime and Punishment the atmosphere seems preserved; near Sennaya Square and Voznesensky bridge the neighbourhood where Raskolnikov lurked and murdered the pawn woman is to be found in close to original shape. Guided walks to the area are offered by the Dostoevsky Memorial Museum.

Joseph Brodsky (1940 - 1996) was a poet, essay-writer and the last Russian man of letters who was awarded the Nobel prize. In 1972 he was forced to emigrate to the USA where he became Professor of Literature and also the Member to the American Academy of Arts. For Brodsky the Baltic Sea has played a central role in his poetic visions. The last poem he wrote before he left the Soviet Union he wrote in Palanga, Lithuania: Lithuanian Divertimento , looking out over the Baltic Sea, for him it seemed to be the end of the world, without belief that he might be able to go on water.

In his home town, on Pestel Street, on the second floor of the famous Muruzi House, yet exists the large communal apartment, in "the room and a half" of which the poet spent seventeen years of his short life. The future museum is apt to become the only site that is really and truly memorial: the apartment has remained almost intact; there is the poet's library there, as well as his writing desk and other belongings. On the day of his departure detailed photographs were taken of the abandoned rooms, which allows to accurately restore the scene.

The Joseph Brodsky museum is meant to be the centre to research not only Brodsky's work but also the non-conformist culture of Leningrad in 1960s - 1980s and modern poetry, which will make another cultural bridge between Russia and the West.

Location
As the inner town of Königsberg has been devastated, there are no visible traces.

A historical picture shows the house as it looked like before the war.

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776 – 1822) was born in Königsberg and died in Berlin, at that time both in Prussia. In between he worked as a judge in Poland and as a musical director in Bamberg and Dresden. The A. in his name derives from his adoration for Mozart, so his full name is Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Amadeus. In 1792-1800, Hoffmann studied law at Königsberg University. During this time he taught music, wrote his first stories and novels, and worked in Königsberg Supreme Court.

Hoffmann's first passions were music and painting, and only in the middle of his short life he started writing. His fiction works were the first examples of the genre of horrors and scary tales. Hoffmann revealed the tragic and sometimes grotesque sides of human nature by populating their lives with sinister characters. He became mostly known for his stories in which supernatural characters reveal people's hidden secrets. One of his Night pieces, Das Majorat (The entail), a short novel in the style of “magic realism“ tells a ghost-story about the decline of a noble family on the Courish Spit outside the village of Rossitten (today's Rybacij), their haunted castle burns down and turns into a ruin - a symbolic ghostly end for the whole of East Prussia.

Location
C. M. Bellman-Museum, Stora Henriksvik, Långholmen, S-11723 Stockholm
Haga slott, Brunnsviken, Solna, 5 km north of Stockholm

Content
Stockholm as the stage for Carl Michael Bellman's poems and songs Fredmans epistlar (1790) is best represented by his favourite place Haga slott at Brunnsviken, Solna, north of Stockholm, and the newly founded Bellman-Museum, situated on the green island of Långholmen in the middle of the city, near the old prison. At his time, Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795), born in the Southern part of Stockholm, was a personal friend of the director of the spinning-house at Långholmen, Hans Hansson Björkman. The site is mentioned in Fredmans Epistel nr 48 (“Solen glimmar blank och trind”) as the passage where the peasants from Lake Mälaren, on their way to the market-places in Stockholm's Old Town had to pay customs for their merchandise (“Lilla Sjötullen”). Outside the old house a spice garden has been installed in the 18 th century style. The park café is open during the summer season.

A very specific place connected with the life of Bellman is also the restaurant Den Gyllene Freden in the Old Town of Stockholm, a hot spot for world literature, as the Swedish Academy is gathering there once a week.

Bellman's grave is situated outside the Klara Church in the middle of Stockholm.

Location
Hammarby, 15 km south-east of Uppsala
Linnéhuset, Svartbäcksgatan 27, S-75332 Uppsala
Botanical Garden, Villavägen 8, S-75236 Uppsala

Content
Botanist and scientist Carl von Linnaeus' (1707-1778) travels among others led him to Lapland in 1732, a travel up the Northern coast line of the Baltic Sea, into the inner Lapland and down the Finnish coast - the nowadays famous diary was published in English in 1811 as Iter Lapponicum, in 1888 in Swedish -, he even spent several years in the Netherlands, and examined later on the provinces of Dalarna, the islands of Öland and Gotland, Västergötland and Scania (1749). Apart from the scientific usefulness these are even literarily splendid texts. Outside of Uppsala, at Hammarby, his life and work have been exhibited since the year 1879.

Carl Linnaeus bought the small estate in 1758. He wanted a farm on the countryside where he could spend the summers together with his family, away from the unhealthy quarters of Uppsala. Today, few Swedish manor-houses preserve such an authentic milieu. It reflects the private life of Linnaeus as well as his scientific work. The plants in the garden and park are from Linaaeus' times, the house of red brick-stone in the park contains parts of his library given back to Sweden by the Linnean Society in London. The estate is accessible for the public from May 1st to September 30 th , opening hours for the park: daily 8am-8pm, for the museum: Tuesday to Sunday 12am-4pm.

Inside Uppsala, Linnaeus' house and private garden are closely connected with the University. The house was re-built by Linnaeus in the years 1742-43 and restored by the Swedish Linné-Society in 1937-38 and transformed into a Linné-Museum with parts of the original collections of Linnaeus himself. In 1930 even the garden (with the former orangery) could be reconstructed in its original shape, with all the plants Linnaeus had planted according to his own system.

Even the Botanical Garden of Uppsala University, the oldest one in Sweden, is dedicated to Linnaeus: at the end of the garden a classical building, built between 1878 and 1807, the Linneanum or Botanicum is situated, with a hall of fame for Linnaeus inside.

The grave plate of Linnaeus is to be seen inside the Cathedral of Uppsala, marking the place where he was buried in 1778.