Vol 10, No 2 (2023)

The article is devoted to a particular issue of artistic topography of the most St. Petersburg work of Russian literature — “Crime and Punishment” by F. M. Dostoevsky. Using address books, atlases, and other reference literature of the 19th century, it traces the routes of the novel’s main hero Rodion Raskolnikov in relation to the urban realities of the Northern capital in the mid-1860s. The author of the article focuses on Raskolnikov’s meetings with Zametov in the Crystal Palace tavern and with Svidrigailov in an unnamed tavern on —sky Prospekt “thirty or forty steps from Sennaya” Square, as well as real St. Petersburg taverns — “Palais de Cristal” and “Sukharevka”, which served as prototypes for the places where the above-named episodes of the novel are played out. The article revises the traditional view, which already has a century-old tradition, according to which the meetings of the protagonist with Zametov and Svidrigailov took place in the same tavern on Obukhovsky (now Moskovsky) Prospekt. The Svidrigailovsky tavern is identified in the article with the real Sukharevka, vividly depicted in the novel by Vs. Krestovsky “Petersburg Slums” (1864–1867), and the “Crystal Palace” in the novel — with a tavern at the “Palais de Cristal” hotel on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Voznesensky Prospekt (a long-established fact, which, however, was subjected to skepticism in the traditional approach). For the first time, there was a solid factual basis for the existence on Obukhovsky Prospekt of the “Palais de Cristal” café, which was homonymous with the hotel on Sadovaya and opened in 1874, eight years after the writing of Dostoevsky’s novel, and which obscured the real picture of the artistic topography of “Crime and Punishment”.

The medical topic in Dostoevsky’s life and work is diverse, multifaceted and autobiographical. Family, everyday life, observations, analysis of symptoms of diseases formed the personal and creative experience of the future author. Dostoevsky, having an analytical mindset, was deeply interested in medical issues, which manifested itself in his work, where he described the illnesses of his heroes with factual accuracy. The writer’s illness was a factor of criticism and literary creativity. In critical literature, it is mainly discussed in the biographical aspect: the influence of epilepsy affects the writer’s work, the pathography of the author and the heroes of his works is studied, their mental illnesses are analyzed. What was Dostoevsky’s epilepsy like? did she help or hinder his creativity? was it evidence of his genius or degeneracy? — critics who are interested in the psychiatric diseases of genius are trying to answer these questions. In this article, the systematization of well-known and little-known evidence of Dostoevsky’s diseases is carried out, the writer’s attitude to medicine is presented, the features of the diagnosis of his diseases are considered, the artistic embodiment of the diseases of his heroes is analyzed, research prospects are outlined.

The article presents the results of archival research devoted to the study of the Moscow branch of the family tree of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The object of consideration was the generation of the grandchildren of the grandfather of the writer Fyodor Timofeevich Nechaev: the Dostoevskys (the children of Maria, his daughter from his first marriage), the Shers and the Stavrovskys (the children of the daughters of F. T. Nechaev from his second marriage — Olga and Ekaterina). Biographical data about the relatives and cousins of F. M. Dostoevsky were extracted from parish and consistory metric books stored in the Central State Archive of the City of Moscow. With a few exceptions (Mikhail, Andrey), metric records of the birth of the writer's siblings are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time; in some cases, archival documents allowed correcting inaccuracies that were present in the biographical literature about Dostoevsky. Of the thirteen Sher brothers and sisters, male and female cousins of the writer, the names of seven were not previously mentioned even in the fundamental “Chronicle of the Generations of Dostoevskys” (2012). Of the seven Stavrovsky brothers and sisters, two were also named for the first time. Metric birth records are provided for all twenty of these relatives of Dostoevsky; for those who died in infancy, there are also death records. In four cases, the article published metric records of the wedding of the writer’s male and female cousins. In conclusion, the importance of biographical information about the Shers and the Stavrovskys is emphasized for the study of such an important event in the life of F. M. Dostoevsky in the 1870s, as was the litigation over the inheritance of A. F. Kumanina, the writer's mother's sister and half-sister of Olga Sher and Ekaterina Stavrovskaya (the so-called “the Kumanin heritage case”).

The article considered three versions of N. N. Strakhov’s essay on the Pushkin Celebration of June 6–8, 1880 and Dostoevsky’s Speech delivered there. A comparative analysis of the texts published in 1880, 1883 and 1888 reveals the evolution of their author’s consciousness and fills in the existing gap in the history of his attitude to Dostoevsky, which has led to the infamous letter to Tolstoy dated November 28, 1883. According to Strakhov, the artistic flair manifested in Dostoevsky’s “Pushkin speech”, originates directly in God, whose mouthpiece the artist becomes aside from his own earthly personality, which does not only lack a connection with the meanings being transmitted, but may also directly contradict them. This is the ideological ground (combined with personal antipathy) on which the “aversion” to Dostoevsky ripens. As he revises his essay, Strakhov arrives increasingly closer to explaining the triumph of “Pushkin’s speech” solely as a victory of the “party,” and ultimately explains it by the insignificance of the event itself. The article draws a conclusion on the ambivalent nature of Strakhov’s thinking. One and the same phenomenon — in this case, Dostoevsky’s “conciliatory attitude” — is “exaggerated” by the critic alternately in a positive and in a negative sense. In regard to the significance of “Pushkin’s speech” in the history of Russian culture, Strakhov moves from unconditional approval to destructive doubt (from I. Aksakov to K. Leontiev).