Makarka-the-Killer: A Novel of Petersburg Life

The thrilling, topical, and captivating novels of Nikolai Zhivotov, a Petersburg crime reporter and writer, enjoyed immense popularity in pre-revolutionary Russia. Zhivotov was famous for conducting his journalistic investigations often 'from the inside', taking on various day jobs and infiltrating different layers of society to get closer to the 'case materials'. He has taken on roles as a waiter, cab driver, gravedigger, and homeless person.

'Makarka-the-Killer' is the most famous work of Zhivotov, which, like most of his novels, is based on the criminal chronicles of Petersburg and unfolds before the reader a somewhat gloomy, but quite colorful underside of metropolitan life in the last years of the empire.