Forgotten Memoirs About F. M. Dostoevsky in the Collection of A. G. Dostoevskaya

In the 140 years that have passed since the death of F. M. Dostoevsky, almost all of his contemporaries’ memoirs about the writer have been published (in separate books and collections). To date, we can assume that the main corpus of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries’ accounts of him is publicly available. However, this does not mean that it is completely exhausted. A review of newspaper clippings collected by A. G. Dostoevskaya allowed us to identify several notes that were previously unaccounted for and missed by the publishers. For the most part, these are small fragments included by their authors in articles on other topics, nevertheless, they are also of interest to the biographers of F. M. Dostoevsky. The article publishes and comments on the memoirs of A. A. Sokolov, S. Atava, Vogue, V. G. Avseenko, V. F. Putsykovich. They are related to the final years of Dostoevsky's life, capturing distinct features of his everyday behavior, specific phrases and statements. Of interest is the story related by V. G. Avseenko about Dostoevsky's attitude to the political events in Europe, as well as Dostoevsky's commentary on his “The Grand Inquisitor,” was recorded by V. F. Putskovich after a meeting in Berlin in 1879.

Prospects of Digital Dostoevsky

There were several epochs in history that have altered the life of mankind. The first epoch was when the oral text was written down. The second was when the German scribe Guttenberg invented the printing press, and the handwritten text became printed. Now text is becoming digital, and there is a natural digitalization of all spheres of human activity, including the legacy of Dostoevsky. Modern information technologies create a new type of text that not only preserves the advantages of oral, handwritten and printed text, but also acquires new capabilities. The digital text expands the range of sources, the volume of information, and stimulates new methods of studying the writer's creative work. Despite the fact that electronic libraries, which currently dominate the Internet, present digital copies of Dostoevsky's printed publications, new types of electronic publications and new tools for analyzing not only handwritten and printed, but also digital text, are emerging. The idea of Digital Dostoevsky is being implemented in Petrozavodsk University projects (since 1995), the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 2016), and the University of Toronto (since 2019). Lexicographic work on Dostoevsky's vocabulary is being carried out in digital format at the Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The article provides an overview and outlines the prospects for the development of Digital Dostoevsky. An important task of the global Digital Dostoevsky is the creation of national bibliographies and electronic libraries and publication of new sources related to the writer's life and work. It is necessary to create the conditions for optimizing and integrating the existing resources. The digital format allows to actively use new text analysis tools and information technology capabilities for research and educational purposes.

F. M. Dostoevsky in the Biased Opinions of the Feuilletonist and Critic V. P. Burenin

The influence of the critic V. P. Burenin on the public life of the 1860s — 1880s is great: his popularity was comparable to that of V. G. Belinsky in the 1840s. According to B. B. Glinsky, everyone has secretly read Burenin's feuilletons, even those who despised the newspaper Novoe Vremya (New Time) and personally hated its critical columnist for the sharpness and rudeness of his polemical style. The article examines the evolution of the critic's views of F. M. Dostoevsky’s work and his role in Russian journalism and literature. In the initial period of his activity, V. P. Burenin tended to adhere to common moods and assessments, and scolded Dostoevsky. Gradually, he realized the scale of Dostoevsky's writing gift. Already a famous and influential author of the Novoe Vremya (New Time), V. P. Burenin became a great admirer, friend and defender of the writer. He was one of the few critics who appreciated the Writer's Diary. After Dostoevsky's death, Burenin maintained good communication with the writer's widow. Their correspondence makes it clear that A. G. Dostoevskaya considered Burenin her colleague in preserving the legacy of her late husband. The letters contain previously unknown information, namely, that the correspondence of the Novoe Vremya (New Time) about the fire in Staraya Russa were penned by A. G. Dostoevskaya herself, as well as some other information about Dostoevsky and the fate of his legacy.

Centenary of F. M. Dostoevsky's Birth in the Soviet Russian Press

This article considers the attitude towards F. M. Dostoevsky in Soviet Russia during the celebration of his centenary based on materials published in the periodical press. Articles from newspapers and magazines of that era (Trud, Petrogradskaya Pravda, Izvestiya Petrogradskogo sovetа rabochikh i krasnoarmeyskikh deputatov, Narodnoe prosveshcheni, Krasnyy voin, Krasnyy komandir, Krasnaya Nov’, Pechat’ i revolyutsiya, Zhizn’ iskusstva, Sarrabis, Vestnik literatury, Artel’noe delo, Nachala, etc.) were used. Many of these texts have not been previously analyzed by scholars of Dostoevsky’s work. Numerous attempts were made in the Soviet press to interpret the work and ideas of F. M. Dostoevsky in the spirit of socialism. The writer’s negative view of revolutionary ideology was either rejected or distorted by Socialists, however, they were attracted by the image of a former convict and a defender of the “humiliated and insulted”. Certain magazines (Artel’noe delo, Nachala) that appeared in Petrograd during the NEP period, published religious and philosophical articles about F. M. Dostoevsky. The ambivalence of the attitude towards the writer, the presence of socialist and Christian interpretations of his work in the press were a sign of a transitional historical period.

New Approaches to the Creative Heritage of F. M. Dostoevsky: Based on the Materials from the Writer

The work is devoted to the substantiation of new research methods used to examine the writer's creative heritage and the concept of Dostoevsky's digital archive. The first part of the article provides examples of the use of online information technologies to create electronic archives of literary and historical texts from different eras, highlight the distinct and common features of the created archival collections, and analyze the principles of material presentation. The material for this part of the research was obtained from the most respectable foreign and Russian Internet portals, which display historical and literary collections and funds associated with various cultural traditions and personas. Each such electronic collection was created on the basis of extensive, sometimes decades-long, scientific work aimed at collecting handwritten and printed sources, restoring handwritten materials, their textual research, studying their creative and non-creative history, determining the methodology of working with them and the concept of their textual and digital reproduction, as well as extensive preparatory work on the selection of technical equipment and digitization of texts. In most cases, such digital archives are not only a place to store sources; they continue to serve research purposes and contain the results and examples of scientific research. In the second part of the article, the tasks of the Dostoevsky digital archive as a collection of texts and a scientific laboratory for the study of the writer's handwritten and printed heritage are formulated. The article substantiates the first stage of research work on the creation of a catalog of Dostoevsky's verbal and non-verbal graphics, based on the combination of modern software methods and textual analysis.

Dostoevsky's Garibaldi: additions to the commentary

This study is a contribution to the research of the extensive topic of Dostoevsky and Garibaldi and is an analysis of two fragments from Dostoevsky's texts, where he addressed the image of the Italian hero. This image is reflected in the artistic, journalistic and epistolary texts by Dostoevsky, his name is calligraphically printed on the pages of two of the writer's notebooks. The article analyzes an episode from the novel "The Idiot": the story of the liar and braggart General Ivolgin about his wound during the Crimean War that was treated by two outstanding surgeons – the Frenchman O. Nelaton and the Russian N. I. Pirogov. It is shown that the subtext of Ivolgin's story refers to the story of Garibaldi's wound in the battle of Aspromonte and the treatment of his leg by O. Nelaton and N. I. Pirogov, which Dostoevsky and his hero learned about from the newspapers. The European and Russian press, which closely followed the political events in Italy and Europe in the 1860s, created a heroic image of this man. The second reference to Garibaldi is from Dostoevsky's Geneva letter to his niece S. A. Ivanova dated January 1 (13), 1868. It presents a parody sketch of contemporary political events and figures in Italy (Cardinal Antonelli, General Kanzler, the defeat of Garibaldi's army at the Battle of Mentana). They are allegorically transferred to the games and amusements of the younger generation of the Ivanov family, with whom the writer spent the summer of 1866. The article corrects the error made by the publishers of Dostoevsky's letters: the title of "general kanzler" (this is how this phrase was published) never existed — in the Battle of Mentana, the supreme commander of the papal troops, which defeated Garibaldi, was General Hermann Kanzler, who had a German origin and surname. The cases considered indicate a significant interest of the writer in the heroic personality of Giuseppe Garibaldi, his activities and fate.

The Effect of the Pushkin Speech in Russian Journalism

The article presents a systematic analysis of the Russian press of 1880, which actively responded to Dostoevsky’s Pushkin Speech. The interpretive boom around his speech is of particular interest for the study of the formative processes of public and national consciousness in Russia. In the history of journalism, the debates that took place at that time can be equated with modern information wars. At the same time, this episode is one of the decisive ones for the ‘Dostoevsky problem’ in criticism and, more broadly, in the Russian public consciousness. The “Pushkin Speech” was obviously of a unifying nature, but it, and even more so the 1880 “A Writer’s Diary,” caused a severe split in journalism, which reflected the mindset of the Russian society. At first, there is a change of semantic accents in telegrams and correspondence, and then the key concept of "panhumanity" is presented exclusively as a “dream” in publications opposing Dostoevsky, one that is not only incompatible with reality, but also distracts from pressing socio-economic problems. There is also an expansion in meaning in the form of the notorious “messianism” of Dostoevsky. The most commonly used concept used by journalists that are hostile to the writer is mysticism as a euphemism for faith. In parallel, a different understanding of the Pushkin speech is being formed in some publications (Mysl’, Nedelya, Novoe Vremya, a little later — Rus’). It views it as a verbalization of the national idea in its focus on the panhuman as a feasible ideal. The dispute that ensued around Dostoevsky’s speech led to the self-determination of the leading trends of Russian thought.

Dostoevsky and Antiquity: Classical Education at the L. I. Chermak Boarding School

The article attempts to identify the classical linguistic and cultural context of F. M. Dostoevsky's education at the L. I. Chermak boarding school. It lists the programs and textbooks that Dostoevsky studied in 1834‒1837 to learn about the intricacies of classical languages and ancient history, and the teachers who may have influenced his perception of ancient history and culture. Using the issues of the “Biblioteka dlya chteniya” (Library for Reading) journal, the authors investigate which texts related to classical antiquity were available to Dostoevsky outside of the curriculum. The period of Dostoevsky's studies at the Chermak boarding school can be characterized as extremely favorable for the assimilation and comprehension of ancient heritage. The reason for this is the emphasis on classical languages in education set by government decisions, successfully augmented by the brilliant teaching staff at the boarding school, i. e., K. M. Romanovsky, N. I. Bilevich and A. M. Kubarev, Dostoevsky saw Greco-Roman antiquity not as a boring and tiresome collection of dead forms, but as a source of fantasies, reflections, comparisons, and sublime ideas. The publications in Library for Reading on history and archeology, literature and art of Ancient Greece and Rome revealed antiquity in a multi-faceted manner, taking the teenager inclined to serious reading far beyond the school curriculum into the world of stunning discoveries, sharp scientific controversy, bold comparisons with modern times and vivid artistic images.

In Defense of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev (Using Materials of the State Archive of the Tomsk Region)

The article introduces into scientific circulation official documents dated 1853‒1855, preserved in the State Archive of the Tomsk region and recreating the last months of the life of Alexander Ivanovich Isaev — a friend of F. M. Dostoevsky in Semipalatinsk, the first husband of Maria Dmitrievna Constant (Isaeva, Dostoevskaya). These documents include: A. I. Isaev's certificate of service, issued on September 27, 1853, and 6 reports and 12 official letters dated February‒November 1855. Until recently, the corpus of biographical literature about Dostoevsky offered an image of A. I. Isaev as a bitter drunkard, a weak-willed man who ruined his career and life and left his family in poverty. Materials of the State Archive of the Tomsk region contain positive characteristics of Isaev and confirm his professional achievements and career growth from 1840 to July 28, 1853, the day of his dismissal. These archival materials reveal an important fact — the official reason for his dismissal from service. It was not Isaev's alcoholism, exaggerated in the works of Dostoevsky's biographers, but a deadly disease, namely, consumption (tuberculosis). This fact explains the words of Dostoevsky in a letter to Baron A. E. Wrangel dated August 14, 1855. about Isaev’s “dark fate”, the writer's unwavering respect and goodwill towards him, as well as the desire to raise his son Pavel as if he was Dostoevsky’s own. Archival materials demonstrate that immediately after the Isaev's death on August 4 (16), 1855, many persons applied for his position as a tavern assessor in the Kuznetsk Zemsky court, but relinquished it soon after starting the job.

Attribution in the Statistics Mirror Anonymous Articles in the “Vremya” and “Epokha” Journals Published by the Dostoevsky Brothers’

The attribution of content of Vremya (Time) and Epokha (Epoch) journals, in which many anonymous and pseudonymous articles have been published, presents many challenges for the researchers. In the XIX–XX centuries, a corpus of texts, which were unambiguously attributed to F. M. Dostoevsky, M. M. Dostoevsky, A. A. Grigoriev, N. N. Strakhov and other Vremya and Epokha authors, was formed on the basis of traditional documentary (letters, payroll, income and expense book, memoirs), ideological and thematic and stylistic evidence. The following types of texts were isolated within the corpus of anonymous and pseudonymous articles, author's and collective articles, editorial inserts, notes; by type of writing - authorship, co-authorship, editing and adaptation of others texts. Modern methods of statistical analysis of formal grammatical and syntactic parameters in the text can provide sufficient grounds for expanding the source attribution base. This article presents the results of a study of a number of anonymous articles in the Dostoevsky brothers' journals using three statistical methods of attribution: linguistic and statistical analysis according to the G. Kjetsaa's method, the Transformer neural network and the Random forest algorithm. These results need to be correlated; they should be taken into account as complementary to traditional attribution methods.