Vol 11, No 3 (2024)

Only F. M. Dostoevsky’s brief message speaks about the completion of his play “Jew Yankel” in January 1844. The article formulates three hypotheses/assumptions about the content of the drama. The first correlates the writer’s idea with the literary tradition of portraying a Jewish moneylender, laid down by Shakespeare (“The Merchant of Venice”), Walter Scott (“Ivanhoe”), Pushkin (“The Miserly Knight”) and Gogol (“Taras Bulba”). The humanizing effect of V. Scott’s novel is emphasized. The second version associates Dostoevsky’s Yankel exclusively with the homonymous character from Gogol’s story, first published in 1835. It is proposed to take into account the author’s revision of the story for the 1842 edition, in which Yankel, in the process of building up the epic potential of the work, is endowed with a powerful vital resource and rises to the role of the antagonist of the title character. The third hypothesis refers to the trial of the Jews in the town of Velizh, who were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and acquitted many years later. Yankel Aronson died under investigation, which was conducted by inhumane methods. Evidence is provided to confirm that Russian society became aware of these events. The painful end of the Jewish youth could serve as a source of drama, structured with a focus on the writings that made a strong impression on Dostoevsky at that time: “The last day of a man sentenced to death” by V. Hugo and the melodrama “Ugolino” by N. Polevoy. All three versions confirm that pity was not only one of young writer’s motives, but also the ontological basis of his creative universe. The scientific significance of each of the proposed hypotheses also lies in the fact that their deployment allows to expand the understanding of the potential sources of the writer’s work, to reveal an unknown or little-known historical and cultural context of his early, least studied period.

F. M. Dostoevsky’s epistolary legacy includes more than 2000 letters from the writer and his correspondents. One of Dostoevsky’s correspondents in 1871‒1874 was V. I. Gubin, a lawyer, Dostoevsky’s attorney in the case against the publisher F. T. Stellovsky. He also advised the writer at the initial stage of the Kumanin inheritance case. One letter from Dostoevsky to Gubin and 15 letters from Gubin to Dostoevsky are known. V. I. Gubin’s letters allow us to complete the image of Stellovsky, a notorious speculator in the publishing business and reveal how the writer’s trial against his publisher proceeded. At the end of 1870 Stellovsky released Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” as the fourth volume of the writer’s Complete Works. For this publication, according to the agreement dated July 1, 1865, Stellovsky was obliged to pay the writer 870 rubles, but he cheated Dostoevsky. Having lost all hope of solving the case peacefully, Dostoevsky launched court proceedings against Stellovsky. First, his stepson P. A. Isaev became the writer’s attorney, and then the role was assumed by Ap. Maikov, who hired lawyer V. I. Gubin at Dostoevsky’s request. The proceedings against Stellovsky, which began in 1871, dragged on for almost 5 years. Judging by Gubin’s letters, who Dostoevsky said “ruined everything,” both the slowness of the bailiffs, to whom the attorney was forced to pay bribes, and the inability to determine the identity of the publisher’s guardians for a long time hindered the process. Gubin also suspected collusion between official authorities and the relatives or guardians of Stellovsky, who since 1872 could no longer take part in the trial himself, as he was being treated in a psychiatric hospital. One of Stellovsky’s guardians, N. M. Sokovnin, settled with Dostoevsky only in 1876. The appendix to the article contains letters from Dostoevsky and Gubin, each letter is accompanied by a textual reference and a commentary.

The article provides an analysis of texts by F. M. Dostoevsky, in which he as editor and author of the “Foreign Events” column in the weekly “The Citizen” analyzed desperate attempts of the Roman pontiff Pius 9th to regain the secular power in the young Italian kingdom, which he had lost in 1870. The writer’s complex attitude towards Italian Old Catholics is considered against the background of their dialogue with the Holy Synod and the coverage of the Correspondence of the Prior of the Roman Embassy Church Archimandrite Alexander with Metropolitan Isador, the first Metropolitan of the Holy Synod. On the one hand, Dostoevsky appreciates the old Catholics’ intention to pass into the jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, on the other hand, he sympathizes with the persecuted Catholic clerics. Describing their attempts to restore the secular power of Pius 9th, Dostoevsky links their actions with the pontiff’s claim to world domination, about whose danger he warns as emphatically in the weekly as in his works, comparing his attack to the Apocalypse, and his very identity with the Antichrist. According to the writer, France’s support for the politics and the papal throne of Pius 9th holds a threat of a military clash between France and Germany.

A. S Pushkin had a great influence on the development of Russian culture in the 19th century, including book publishing. Pushkin’s motifs and images have repeatedly appeared in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky. The last year of the writer’s life was marked by the triumphant “Pushkin’s Speech,” which turned the overall idea of Russian literature upside down. A. G. Dostoevskaya, who began an active bibliographic and publishing life after the death of her husband, followed the tradition of Pushkin’s publications in it. By the time the Complete Works of F. M. Dostoevsky were published, Pushkin studies had already actively solved textual problems, thereby facilitating subsequent researchers and publishers to work on compiling collections of works and bibliographies of writers. Systematizing her husband’s collected materials, A. G. Dostoevskaya focused on the bibliographic index of Pushkin’s works “Puschkiniana,” compiled by V. I. Mezhov. This is evidenced by the notes she made in her notebooks. The main consultant to the writer’s widow, who for several years had been independently preparing the first bibliography of Dostoevsky for publication, was P. A. Efremov, bibliographer, Pushkin scholar and editor of the Complete Works of A. S. Pushkin. In the poet’s anniversary year of 1899, A. G. Dostoevskaya published Dostoevsky’s Pushkin’s Speech in a separate edition, calling it “Pushkin” and thereby contributing to the celebration of the founder of Russian literature. Pushkin’s work played a significant role not only in Dostoevsky’s biography and literary legacy, but also in the bibliographic and traditional activities of the writer’s wife.

Dostoevsky’s literary debut was his epistolary novel “Poor People.” Epistolary genres and subgenres are vital in many of the writer’s works. It can definitely be argued that Dostoevsky’s literary talent initially manifested itself in his letters to his brother Mikhail in 1838. Despite the ironic criticism of the genre, the author without any modesty called his letters “masterpieces of belles lettres.” This borrowing from the French chefs-d’euvre de la lettristique characterizes the young writer’s degree of ambition. The letters of Dostoevsky and his correspondents constitute a significant part of his literary heritage. They carry a huge aesthetic and artistic potential, which is underestimated in many ways. Critics and readers do not see the author as a poet and an artist, while Dostoevsky is a genius in any genre: whether novels, essays, feuilletons, or letters. The list of Dostoevsky’s correspondents included hundreds of addressees: extended family and relatives, friends and acquaintances, readers and fans, writers, critics and publishers, creditors and loan sharks, students and students of Higher women’s courses. Many of the writer’s interlocutors were prominent personas in Russia. Young women and divorced ladies wrote to him, asking for advice and guidance, and sometimes expecting mentoring in literary verse and prose work. The writer awakened in them the gift of words, imagination, and critical judgment. His readers comprised many who were congenial to the author. There are twelve works in Dostoevsky’s corpus of texts that he called novels, two of them epistolary — “Poor People” and “A Novel in Nine Letters.” There are more of them, if we turn to the writer’s epistolary legacy. Dostoevsky and his correspondents wrote letters, and they often served as the foundation of epistolary novels. The epistolary genre multiplies the collection of Dostoevsky’s novels, expands and enriches the creative legacy of the genius.