Truths and lies in a TV series about “Dostoevsky beyond the textbook”

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.