During his lifetime, Vsevolod Krestovsky wrote many stories, essays, novellas, and novels. There was enough for an eight-volume collected works published after the writer’s death. But fame and success Krestovsky, without a doubt, brought the novel “Petersburg Slums.” It wasn’t just read—it was devoured. In modern terms, the novel became a real bestseller of Russian literature in the second half of the 19th century. Especially astonishing and interesting to contemporaries was the Petersburg that Krestovsky revealed—Petersburg of the slums: readers even organized group excursions to places described in the novel—taverns, pawn shops of moneylenders, the embankments of the Neva and the Kryukov Canal, and so on. Krestovsky managed to organically combine the traditions of everyday “life-writing” prose with an adventurous plot, in which the fates of heroes from very different social groups intertwine— from representatives of high society down to beggars and thieves. In short, it was all of Petersburg—brilliant and criminal.