Pushkin Speech by Fedor Dostoevsky as an Event (Based on the Materials of the Manuscript Fund of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature)

140 years ago, on June 8 (20), 1880, on the occasion of the celebrations associated with the opening of the monument to Alexander Pushkin, F. M. Dostoevsky gave a speech at the second meeting of the Society of Connoisseurs of Russian Literature at the Moscow Noble Assembly hall. It was immediately recognized as a social and cultural event. This episode in Dostoevsky’s biography has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers. The manuscript collection of The V. I. Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature contains a significant set of materials related to Dostoevsky’s participation in the Pushkin Celebration. In the process of collecting materials for the Memorial Museum of F. M. Dostoevsky, A. G. Dostoevskaya, the writer’s widow conducted thorough bibliographic work, tracing almost all available publications in the Russian press devoted to Pushkin speech. She made extensive extracts from newspapers, which allow you to see the event through the eyes of Russian reporters. As the analysis shows, only minor fragments of newspaper reports were of interest to Dostoevsky’s biographers. The characteristic of the responses of the Russian press to Pushkin speech as a major public event, presented in this article, allows to expand the context of Dostoevsky’s speech and offer a more detailed overview of the audience of Pushkin speech. An observation is made about the similarity of the event associated with Dostoevsky’s speech with his optimistic anthropology, formulated in the article Golden age in the pocket (1876, A Writer’s Diary). The presented systematic corpus of publications rooted in the Pushkin speech, allows us to conclude that the speech itself became the most important information event of 1880 as a social and cultural event and literary and journalistic essay. The Appendix to the article contains photos of some materials from the Manuscript Fund of the Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature.