scholarly journals The First Production of The Brothers Karamazov on the Russian stage in the Mirror of the Press (Based on the Collections of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature)

Author(s):  
Pavel E. Fokin ◽  
Ilya O. Boretsky

The first Russian theatrical production of Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov premiered on the eve of Dostoevsky’s 20th death anniversary on January 26 (February 7) 1901 at the Theater of the Literary and Artistic Society (Maly Theater) in St. Petersburg as a benefit for Nikolay Seversky. The novel was adapted for the stage by K. Dmitriev (Konstantin Nabokov). The role of Dmitry Karamazov was performed by the famous dramatic actor Pavel Orlenev, who had received recognition for playing the role of Raskolnikov. The play, the staging, the actors’ interpretation of their roles became the subject of detailed reviews of the St. Petersburg theater critics and provoked controversial assessments and again raised the question about the peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s prose and the possibility of its presentation on stage. The production of The Brothers Karamazov at the Maly Theater in St. Petersburg and the controversy about it became an important stage in the development of Russian realistic theater and a reflection of the ideas of Dostoevsky’s younger contemporaries about the distinctive features and contents of his art. The manuscript holdings of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature includes Anna Dostoevskaya’s collection containing a set of documentary materials (the playbill, newspaper advertisements, reviews, feuilletons), which makes it possible to form a complete picture of the play and Russian viewers’ reaction to it. The article provides a description of the performance, and voluminous excerpts from the most informative press reviews. The published materials have not previously attracted special attention of researchers.

Author(s):  
Pavel E. Fokin ◽  
Ilya O. Boretsky

The first Russian theatrical production of Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov premiered on the eve of Dostoevsky’s 20th death anniversary on January 26 (February 7) 1901 at the Theater of the Literary and Artistic Society (Maly Theater) in St. Petersburg as a benefit for Nikolay Seversky. The novel was adapted for the stage by K. Dmitriev (Konstantin Nabokov). The role of Dmitry Karamazov was performed by the famous dramatic actor Pavel Orlenev, who had received recognition for playing the role of Raskolnikov. The play, the staging, the actors’ interpretation of their roles became the subject of detailed reviews of the St. Petersburg theater critics and provoked controversial assessments and again raised the question about the peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s prose and the possibility of its presentation on stage. The production of The Brothers Karamazov at the Maly Theater in St. Petersburg and the controversy about it became an important stage in the development of Russian realistic theater and a reflection of the ideas of Dostoevsky’s younger contemporaries about the distinctive features and contents of his art. The manuscript holdings of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature includes Anna Dostoevskaya’s collection containing a set of documentary materials (the playbill, newspaper advertisements, reviews, feuilletons), which makes it possible to form a complete picture of the play and Russian viewers’ reaction to it. The article provides a description of the performance, and voluminous excerpts from the most informative press reviews. The published materials have not previously attracted special attention of researchers.


Author(s):  
Pavel E. Fokin

Throughout Dostoevsky's life, reading newspapers was one of the most important sources of his inspiration. Reading newspapers, Dostoevsky drew on real factual material that reflected both the characteristic phenomens of the postreform Russian reality and the most incredible “adventures” of lost human souls and hearts. Daily acquaintance with the latest news from Russian and world life was an essential necessity for Dostoevsky. Even while abroad, he regularly visited libraries to read the most recent Russian newspapers. Journalism was inherent in his type of thinking and personality. He began his literary career as a newspaper feuilletonist; in 1873–1874, he edited the Grazhdanin (The Citizen) weekly; in1876–1877, his monojournal A Writer's Diary was focused on Russian and European periodicals. In 1881, having completed his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky decided to resume the publication of A Writer's Diary. He prepared only one issue which came out on the day of his funeral. The manuscript collection of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature contains Anna Dostoevskaya’s collection that includes a memorial copy of the last newspaper read by Dostoevsky on the eve of his fatal illness, the Novoe Vremya (The New Time) newspaper, No. 1764 dated January 25 (February 6) 1881. This item is a valuable biographical material and allows one to put additional touches on the picture of Dostoevsky's intellectual life of his last days. The article provides an overview of the newspaper’s contents contextualized within Dostoevsky's spiritual, political, and aesthetic interests and particularly within the articles included in the first issue of The Diary of a Writer for 1881 and the preparatory materials for it.


Author(s):  
Pavel E. Fokin

Throughout Dostoevsky's life, reading newspapers was one of the most important sources of his inspiration. Reading newspapers, Dostoevsky drew on real factual material that reflected both the characteristic phenomens of the postreform Russian reality and the most incredible “adventures” of lost human souls and hearts. Daily acquaintance with the latest news from Russian and world life was an essential necessity for Dostoevsky. Even while abroad, he regularly visited libraries to read the most recent Russian newspapers. Journalism was inherent in his type of thinking and personality. He began his literary career as a newspaper feuilletonist; in 1873–1874, he edited the Grazhdanin (The Citizen) weekly; in1876–1877, his monojournal A Writer's Diary was focused on Russian and European periodicals. In 1881, having completed his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky decided to resume the publication of A Writer's Diary. He prepared only one issue which came out on the day of his funeral. The manuscript collection of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature contains Anna Dostoevskaya’s collection that includes a memorial copy of the last newspaper read by Dostoevsky on the eve of his fatal illness, the Novoe Vremya (The New Time) newspaper, No. 1764 dated January 25 (February 6) 1881. This item is a valuable biographical material and allows one to put additional touches on the picture of Dostoevsky's intellectual life of his last days. The article provides an overview of the newspaper’s contents contextualized within Dostoevsky's spiritual, political, and aesthetic interests and particularly within the articles included in the first issue of The Diary of a Writer for 1881 and the preparatory materials for it.


Author(s):  
Anna V. Petrova

The article analyses the reaction of the press to the publication of A Writer’s Diary in 1873. It aims to answer the question of why leading daily newspapers such as Golos, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, Birzhevye Vedomosti, Novoye Vremya, did not accept and negatively evaluated Dostoevsky’s work as columnist and editor of the Grazhdanin. Dostoevsky returned to the newspaper business with a new genre, and from the very beginning of A Writer's Diary he declares his unlimited freedom of choice about the topics and format of his conversations with the reader. This fact immediately distinguished him from other columnists, who usually followed the standards of the feuilleton (a genre normally dedicated to the latest news), and strictly obeyed their editorial policies, constantly taking into account the publisher’s “wishes”. Columnists from leading newspapers in 1873–1874 could not find similarities between their work and Dostoevsky’s, between his method of describing reality and theirs, and so they neither could nor wanted to see the author’s novelty and originality that went beyond the established newspaper practice, to be surprised by the courage and innovation of his Writer’s Diary. Instead, most of the journalists (Lev Panyutin, Arkady Kovner, Mikhail Wilde and others) chose to be “critical” and – using irony, satirical attacks, sarcastic comments mockingly sought to undermine Dostoevsky’s authority as a columnist and discredit the values that he put above all in A Writer's Diary in 1873 (a “heartfelt” knowledge of Christ, the purification through suffering, the preservation of a relationship with the people). The article attempts to trace the development of this controversy and the factors that influenced its contents.


Author(s):  
George S. Prokhorov ◽  

Julio Jurenito – a 1924 Modernist novel by Ilya Ehrenburg, written hot on the heels of the 1917 Revolution and is distinguished by both a wide intertextual spectrum and an acute satirical orientation in relation to all ideological trends and factions. The article focuses on references of the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg to the legacy of Dostoevsky – primarily – The Brothers Karamazov. Ilya Ehrenburg resets Dostoevsky’s features – his protagonists and some elements of plot – into the reality of European history of the First World War, Russian Revolution and Civil War. But also, Ehrenburg goes beyond Dostoevsky’s semantic continuum, replacing the author’s sense of History as a process striving for its endpoint with a History in which an end is fundamentally impossible, and there is always at least the potential to put the flow of event on pause and rewrite their mistakes. As well, the idea important for Dostoevsky that of the moral damage of the modern atheist-minded person is transformed into a demonstration of the people’s inclination to create idols and devoutly worship the latter. Ilya Ehrenburg’s novel is grounded on an interpretation of Dostoevsky, perfected through the prism of the traditions of the Jewish Enlightenment.


Author(s):  
Anna V. Petrova

The article analyses the reaction of the press to the publication of A Writer’s Diary in 1873. It aims to answer the question of why leading daily newspapers such as Golos, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, Birzhevye Vedomosti, Novoye Vremya, did not accept and negatively evaluated Dostoevsky’s work as columnist and editor of the Grazhdanin. Dostoevsky returned to the newspaper business with a new genre, and from the very beginning of A Writer's Diary he declares his unlimited freedom of choice about the topics and format of his conversations with the reader. This fact immediately distinguished him from other columnists, who usually followed the standards of the feuilleton (a genre normally dedicated to the latest news), and strictly obeyed their editorial policies, constantly taking into account the publisher’s “wishes”. Columnists from leading newspapers in 1873–1874 could not find similarities between their work and Dostoevsky’s, between his method of describing reality and theirs, and so they neither could nor wanted to see the author’s novelty and originality that went beyond the established newspaper practice, to be surprised by the courage and innovation of his Writer’s Diary. Instead, most of the journalists (Lev Panyutin, Arkady Kovner, Mikhail Wilde and others) chose to be “critical” and – using irony, satirical attacks, sarcastic comments mockingly sought to undermine Dostoevsky’s authority as a columnist and discredit the values that he put above all in A Writer's Diary in 1873 (a “heartfelt” knowledge of Christ, the purification through suffering, the preservation of a relationship with the people). The article attempts to trace the development of this controversy and the factors that influenced its contents.


Slavic Review ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 678-701
Author(s):  
Jason Cieply

In drafts, correspondence, and diaries from the mid-1870s, Fedor Dostoevskii makes repeated allusions to Fedor Tiutchev’s paradoxical articulation of the inefficacy of the word in “Silentium!” but removes them from the printed versions of his texts. The only exception is Brothers Karamazov, where Dmitrii reproduces garbled fragments of the poem under interrogation and in commenting on Ivan’s silence-like speech. I use these “traces” of “Silentium!” to shed light on Dostoevskii’s conscious experimentation with authorial silence in novels conventionally understood in terms of the polyphonic proliferation of speech. Beginning with Mikhail Bakhtin’s own allusion to “Silentium!” in the unpublished Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, the theorist came to emphasize the role of silence in polyphony. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s acknowledgement of the affinity between negative theology and the negative path to affirmation taken in deconstruction, I show how Bakhtin comes to conceive of the history of the novel as the gradual development of apophatic strategies for approximating the unspoken interior world of the other in writing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 166-174
Author(s):  
Boris Tikhomirov

The article deals with a textual incident that occurred in the history of the publication of the chapter “Hell. Ivan Fedorovich’s nightmare” from the novel The Brothers Karamazov. When sending the manuscript of the chapter to “Russkiy Vestnik” (“Russian Bulletin”) for publication, in the cover letter to N. A. Lyubimov Dostoevsky expressed concern that the journal’s editorial staff might find the words “hysterical shrieks of the cherubim,” pronounced by the devil, obscene. The writer insisted on the absolute artistic justification of such an expression coming from the lips of his infernal character, begging Lyubimov to leave this version in print. However, he foresaw censorship difficulties and offered a backup version to replace the line (“if you can’t”): “joyous cries of the cherubim,” adding with regret that it will sound stylistically dissonant. As a result, the journal published the compromise version devised by N. A. Lyubimov, namely “joyful shrieks of the cherubim.” Although Dostoevsky’s letter clearly expressed his attitude to the “backup” versions, in a separate edition, which was published immediately after the magazine, he reproduced the devil’s remark exactly as it was printed in the “Russkiy Vestnik”. In the academic Complete Works of Dostoevsky, the printed version was “canonized” as an expression of the last author’s will of the writer. The article challenges this textual decision and justifies the need to revert to the version contained in the typeset manuscript, as it is reconstructed from Dostoevsky’s letter to Lyubimov: “hysterical shrieks of the cherubim”.


2021 ◽  
pp. 198-224
Author(s):  
Jordi Morillas

This article analyses the perception, influence, interpretation and translation of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s life and work in the Republic of Argentina. First, it describes how the Argentines have interpreted the author of The Brothers Karamazov from biographical, philological, historical, psychological, religious, theological and philosophical perspectives, from his first appearance in the early 1880s to the present (2021). References are made to studies published both in the press and in strictly academic circles (articles, books, dissertations). Dostoevsky’s influence is manifested secondarily in the novelistic and poetic work of the great Argentine writers of the twentieth century (Roberto Artl, Ernesto Sabato, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges). It follows a brief history of Spanish translations (directly or through other languages) of Fyodor Mikhailovich’s novels and short stories in Argentina, with particular emphasis on the most widely read and studied of all his works, Crime and Punishment. It also lists the major works of secondary bibliography that first appeared on the Argentine market in Spanish and have had a remarkable influence on Dostoevsky’s studies outside Argentina, such as in Mexico or Spain. Finally, an attempt is made to clarify the reasons why the Argentine people are still today (on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth, 1821–2021) one of the main readers and interpreters of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s works, through a series of considerations based on psychology, history and demography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 70-105
Author(s):  
Liudmila Saraskina

The paper offers a detailed analysis of Dostoevsky, a historical and biographical feature TV serial (in eight episodes), produced in 2011, when the writer’s 190th anniversary was celebrated. The film was directed by V. I. Khotinenko, the script was written by E. Ya. Volodarsky. The authors of the series claimed that their objective was to create an image of “Dostoevsky beyond the textbook”, wholly (or largely) unknown to today’s audience. But the authors did not explain what they meant by “Dostoevsky beyond the textbook”, nor, for that matter, by the “textbook” version. Professional expertise had found numerous gross distortions of both Dostoevsky’s biography and Russian history in the script. Nevertheless, after certain corrections by the film director, the flawed script was accepted as the basis for the series, which, in the end, proved to be as flawed. The objective of the film, as defined by the director, was to show the “human dimension” Dostoevsky, was realized in a very peculiar manner: for the sake of pseudo-dramatization, the writers’ real experiences in the fatal moments of his life were replaced with fictitious experiences; many events, well known and well documented, were deliberately misrepresented. For the film director, Dostoevsky was chiefly interesting as a person burdened with many vices, whose biography had been full of extraordinary striking episodes. The film director, by his arbitrary will, ascribed to Dostoevsky the desires, passions and actions of some of his fictional characters; this dubious, though frequently employed, technique has been readily utilized in the series. Numerous erotic episodes were supposed to demonstrate to today’s audience that nothing human was alien to Dostoevsky. His literary activity, his public readings (which he liked so much) were presented as bait used to lure the victims of his male lust. The series showed, as it were, that the writer had rehearsed, in his private space, the would-be crimes of his characters. The real, wellknown, Dostoevsky has remained outside the series. Viewers will not find his work on the novel The Possessed, the creative history of The Brothers Karamazov, the inauguration of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow, Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech, his dramatic relations with Pobedonostsev, his friendship with S. A. Tolstaya (the widow of Alexei K. Tolstoy), the severe illness of his last days, his death, or his funeral, unprecedented in Russia.


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