During his life, Vsevolod Krestovsky wrote many stories, essays, novellas, and novels. This was enough for a collected works in eight volumes, published after the writer’s death. But Krestovsky’s novel “The Slums of St. Petersburg” certainly brought fame and success to Krestovsky. They didn’t just read it, they were engrossed in it. In modern terms, the novel became a real bestseller in Russian literature of the second half of the 19th century. Contemporaries were especially struck and interested in the Petersburg slums discovered by Krestovsky - Petersburg: readers even went on collective excursions to the places described in the novel: taverns, moneylenders' shops, the embankments of the Neva and Kryukov Canal, etc. Krestovsky managed to organically combine the traditions of everyday prose with an adventurous plot, in in which the fates of heroes belonging to a variety of social groups are intertwined - from representatives of high society to beggars and thieves. In a word, all of St. Petersburg, brilliant and criminal.