Memorial of Robert Bird

The paper contains memories of Robert Bird (1969–2020), distinguished scholar and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

Let us Call in Dostoevsky for an Expert Advice (Perspectives for the Darovoe Estate)

Third paper on the topic. The formation of the restoration project of the Darovoe Museum is reaching a turning point. Bringing the creative laboratory of the museum construction into public space allows the scientific community to influence the process of establishing a new museum of the writer and sets a precedent for transparency in the restoration process. The combination of museum design, natural landscape, and architectural research with the achievements of philologists and historians are forming a new kind of interdisciplinary cooperation between scientists and practitioners. In fact, the process is now facing a conflict, ultimately of axiological nature. The article includes proposals of famous scholars to the General Directorate of the Cultural Heritage for the Moscow Region and the Protocol of the meeting of the section of the Council for the Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation; it presents the contradictions causing conflict. The concept of a natural museum of Dostoevsky’s childhood, defended by the academic community, is winning the right to implement with great effort.

“About a Symbol”: Genesis and Parallels. Article Two. Dostoevsky as a Symbolist

The article is devoted to the literary and philosophical origins of Sergei Durylin’s report “On a Symbol in Dostoevsky” (the report was read in 1926 at a meeting of the Commission for the Study of Dostoevsky at the Literary Section of GAKhN). The history of the report in the context of the Literary Section is considered. Аbstracts and debates on the report are published for the first time. The relationship of Durylin’s ideas with the complex of Dostoevsky’s interpretations, developed by both the Symbolists (G.I. Chulkov) and Russian religious philosophers (P.A. Florensky, A.F. Losev) is shown. Both the report “On a Symbol in Dostoevsky’s” and the subsequent report “Landscape in Dostoevsky’s” are devoted to an anthropological and Christological story, connected with the symbolism of the setting sun, the symbolism of “oblique rays”, and its embodiment in Dostoevsky’s novels. Both texts are a continuation and a development of the same theme. A landscape is an artist’s mapping of nature, the created world; interiors are the artist’s image of the anthropomorphic world, the human space. The ontological symbol receives its sociocultural projection: a landscape or an interior. The problem of the relationship between the mapping/image and the object of the image, the problem of the ontological status of reality and its embodiment in the artistic/mythopoetic language, reflected in the report, corresponded to the focus of GAKhN on the development of a new “language of things” and a new concept of the humanitarian knowledge. The article is timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of F.M. Dostoevsky, the 135th anniversary of S.N. Durylin, and the 100th anniversary of GAKhN.

Two Egoists (Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted and Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge)

The article is devoted to the reception of Charles Dickens by Dostoevsky, who was an ardent reader of Dickens. The author of the article shows that Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted clearly demonstrates the influence not only of Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop but also of his next, less popular, novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) which was published in Russian translation in the “Otechestvennye Zapiski” in 1842. The article reveals some similarities of the plot and, more importantly, between the characters of the two novels: Count Volkovsky and Sir Chester, who personify the type of antiromantic egoists which will be developed with more depth in Dostoevsky’s later works.

The Italian Reception of Dostoevsky’s Novel The Adolescent

The article analyses the Italian reception of Dostoevsky’s novel The Adolescent. The small number of translations of the novel in Italian, as well as the lack of critical works specifically devoted to it, indicate little interest in the book on the part of both the average Italian reader and the academic community, especially when compared to other works by Dostoevsky. The second part of the article offers an overview of the prefaces to the various editions, which are, in fact, the only works in Italian exclusively devoted to the novel.

Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Arab World(About E.A. Ali-Zadе’s Book)

The review is devoted to the second part of the second book Russian Literature and the Arab World (On the History of Arabic-Russian Literary Relations) (2020) by Elmira Abdulkerimovna Ali-Zade (1940-2019), Orientalist, Ph.D. in Philology, and Senior Researcher of the Institute of Oriental Studies of Russian Academy of Sciences. It examines the perception of Dostoevsky’s life and works in the Arab countries in the early 20th – early 21st centuries and analyzes the peculiarities of translations of the works by the Russian writer into Arabic.

We Need Literature to Live’: Discussing the Italian Video Production of ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’

The article is dedicated to the video production “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”, based on the homonymous play staged by Teatro OUT OFF in Milan and produced by “Meeting for Friendship Amongst People”. The play is enriched with an introduction by Tatiana Kasatkina and closing speeches by students and pupils. The review presents the peculiarity and the history of the video through the words of three participants

Beyond the Words. Apollonio, Carol Dostoevsky’s Secrets. Reading Against the Grain. Review

Going “against the grain”, Carol Apollonio notices unusual and unexpected relations between characters, and by underlining the realism in Dostoevsky’s works, she relates them to real life. There is no work of Dostoevsky that could be able to stand up to criticism founded on strictly logical schemes, general rules, and writers’ “models”. Dostoevsky does everything wrong, differently from all the others. Carol Apollonio’s book marks the beginning of a new phase in research on Dostoevsky. She is like a small university whose main lesson is to teach its students systemic thinking and how to approach self-instruction systematically and without stereotypes. Carol Apollonio’s book shows once again how Dostoevsky, maybe more than any other writer in the world, does not tolerate fixed opinions nor research methods approved once and for all.

The Resistance of Memory in Stavrogin’s ‘Confession’

The article investigates the resistance of memory as a typical narration technique in Dostoevsky’s works, especially in confessional texts. The attention is focused on a fragment of the unpublished chapter “At Tikhon’s” from an unrealized version of the novel The Possessed: Stavrogin bought a photograph of “one girl”, which he perceives as a photograph of Matryosha herself. The article attempts to explain how Stavrogin organizes memories in his “confession” and why the cases of memory aberrations become both the constructive elements of the genre of literary confession and an original “tool” for the protagonist’s self-knowledge. The illustrative memory aberration is considered here in connection with the problems of narration, the psychology of the protagonist, and the visual forms of representation.

“Restoring the Kinship”: the Novel The Adolescent as a Prologue to the Dialogue Between Nikolay Fedorov and Fyodor Dostoevsky

The article is an attempt to read the novel The Adolescent in the light of the spiritual and creative dialogue between the philosopher of the common task Nikolay Fedorov and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Although The Adolescent was written and published three years before Fedorov’s student N. Peterson presented his teacher’s ideas to the writer in the article “What should a people’s school be?”, the novel can be considered as a prologue to the topic that eventually became the subject of Fedorov’s main work The question of brotherhood or kinship, about the causes of the non-fraternal, unrelated, i.e. non-peaceful, state of the world, and about the means to restore kinship. The plot of the novel is interpreted in the article through the prism of Fedorov’s themes of non-kinship and the restoration of universal kinship, the idea of returning the hearts of sons to their fathers and the fathers’ ones to their children. It is shown how the theme of “family as the practical beginning of love” is expressed in the novel.