An Album from Argentina: Dostoevsky in the Сollection of A. I. Kalugin

The reserves of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad in Moscow holds 84 large-format albums with clippings from emigrant newspapers from the 1940s and 1950s, selected according to various subjects (Necropolis, Icons, Church, Our achievements, etc.). These materials are a valuable source for researchers, since the collections of emigrant periodicals in Russian and foreign libraries are fragmented. All albums are predictably associated with the activities of the Russian emigrants. In 1996, A. I. and N. D. Solzhenitsyns transferred them to the collection of the House. The materials were initially received from the collector himself — Alexey Ivanovich Kalugin (1883–1982), a Russian emigrant who lived in Lithuania, Germany, Italy and Argentina. The article clarifies a number of biographical facts about Kalugin, presents a letter to him from A. I. Solzhenitsyn dated September 21, 1980, analyzes the content of the album “Dostoevsky” from the Russian Writers series. In it Kalugin included excerpts from Golos naroda, Novoe russkoe slovo, Russkaya mysl, Narodnaya pravda, Za pravdu, Nasha strana, Seyatel, and other newspapers that reported on new editions of the writer’s books, performances, literary debates and lectures devoted to his work (professor V. N. Ilyin, writer Osip Dymov, etc.). They also contained information on the activities of the “Circle for the study of Dostoevsky” in Paris under the leadership of G. A. Meyer, and presented the commemoration program for the 70th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s death in France. The album includes reviews of published books about the writer’s work, articles about his life and work written by critics and emigrant researchers, the first publications of essays by I. S. Shmelev, B. K. Zaitsev and A. M. Remizov about Dostoevsky in Russian, etc. Among the little-known materials previously unpublished in Russia, the Kalugin album contains an article by Ekaterina Dostoevskaya about Fedyusha — the writer’s grandson, a publication of the boy’s poems, Professor V. N. Speransky’s memoirs about Anna Dostoevskaya and an interview with her. These materials are published in the Appendix to the article.