Tchaikovsky composed of some of the world's most wonderful ballet music, including Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, The Sleeping Beauty and Onegin, and of course of the bombastic 1812 Overture.
He first came to St.Petersburg when he was 10 years old and studied here for 9 years at the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence and nearly three years at St. Petersburg Conservatory. He filled his life here with music and kept returning back to this city. The first public performance of any of his works took place in August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger conducted Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk, near St. Petersburg.
Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg on November 6, 1893, nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique. Though only 53 years old, he lived a long life compared to many Russian 19th century composers. He is buried in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery St.Petersburg, near the graves of fellow-composers
For those who admire Tchaikovsky St.Petersburg presents a great chance to turn over the pages of his biography visiting places connected with him.
A Russian novelist and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart, together with his unsurpassed moments of illumination, had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction.
Born in Moscow Dostoyevsky moved to St Petersburg to attend a military academy when he was aged 16. Overall Dostoyevsky lived in St.Petersburg for 28 years before his death in 1881. He grave is in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Saint Petersburg.
He never had his own apartment: he moved 20 times, never living in one place longer than 3 years. We will visit both places described in his novels, such as "Crime and Punishment" - and those connected with him personally. The relationship between a man and his city environment was one of the Dostoyevsky trump themes - so walking along his routes we will try to perceive St.Petersburg the way he saw it.
Communist USSR was perceived as the main danger for a long period of time, but how was such a society created? What were its first leaders like? What made soviet people different from the rest of the world? What did they put their trust in? Why did they supported a regime which the rest of the world considered terrifying?
I suggest looking at the communist regime from the Russian point of view: visiting the places connected with revolution, speaking about the ideas which inspired Russian people to create a society of a new type - their dreams and how they turned out in reality.
In 1941-1944 the city survived the most destructive siege in the history of human warfare. More than 800,000 citizens lost their lives to starvation, cold, artillery shelling and air raids. The Siege of Leningrad tour offers you a unique opportunity to go beyond the city's tourist facades and visit the battlefields and memorial sites of the most dramatic siege of the WWII.
This tour explores the history and background of the Russian Revolution, visiting the places in St. Petersburg associated with some of the main events. We'll learn how the Soviet system was shaped, how it degenerated into a bureaucratic dictatorship and what the reasons were for its imminent collapse in the 1980s, together with getting an insight into the life of ordinary Soviet people and Communist party bosses.
