Vol 8, No 1 (2021)

The year 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth and the 140th anniversary of his immortality. Literary anniversaries became a part of the Russian culture relatively recently. The celebration is usually held in memory of those who had already found eternity. The attempt to celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare (1864) and the centenary of Pushkin’s birth in 1899 marked the beginning of a new cultural tradition. The dates of literary anniversaries in the 20th century reflect the struggle between these trends: birthdays are gradually replacing memorial days. Anniversaries tend to be an occasion not only for understanding a writer’s significance in the modern world, but also for analyzing the trends and prospects of studying their legacy. The article provides an overview of the past anniversaries of Dostoevsky in Russia and an analysis of several articles from the first issue of The Unknown Dostoevsky journal for 2021. The special feature of Dostoevsky’s bicentennial anniversary is the competition held by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) “Sources and methods in the study of the legacy of F. M. Dostoevsky in Russian and world culture” (2018–2021), which resulted in the support of 28 projects by leading Russian scientists. They will result in the publication of an unprecedented corpus of studies on Dostoevsky’s biography, philosophy, creativity, textual criticism and poetics. In post-Soviet Russia, the gap between Dostoevsky studies and mass consciousness, science and education is apparent. Moreover, technologies to counteract Dostoevsky’s influence on the modern Russian person are still operating. Reading and studying Dostoevsky remains the privilege of philologists, whose number in Russian universities has been drastically reduced with no prospects of the development of continuous humanitarian education. Nevertheless, despite influential opponents, Dostoevsky represents Russia, the Karamazovs are the most famous Russian surname, and today, just like 150 years ago, the prophet and apostle Dostoevsky conveys the word of truth and veracity to the world.

The subject of research in this article is a partially crossed out portion of a letter from Fyodor Dostoevsky to his brother Mikhail dated September 30, 1844. This letter communicates his decision to leave the military service and devote himself to professional literary work. The entry was first reproduced in the edition of Dostoevsky’s correspondence prepared by A. S. Dolinin, and then in the academic Complete Works. However, this was done with distortions and without proper commentary. As a result, the entry was perceived by readers as a rude expletive, which included slang, obscene vocabulary, and insults to the guardian of the Dostoevskys, P. A. Karepin, who opposed the switch of his ward to a literary path and was in no hurry to provide him with financial assistance. Textual analysis of the record about Karepin demonstrated that the strikethrough was made twice — by Dostoevsky himself at the time of writing the letter, and almost 40 years later by his widow, who was preparing the letters for publication. Due to her shyness, A. G. Dostoevskaya could not tolerate obscene words contained in the body of the letter, and she removed them with a thick strikethrough, while encrypting their meaning using shorthand. The restoration of the complete record made it possible to determine the source of the quote, namely, the “indecent” poem Luka Mudishchev, written in the post-Pushkin period and attributed to Ivan Barkov, but not written by him. The fact that Dostoevsky knew this poem by 1844 narrows down the range of its dating. In the heat of his “struggle” with Karepin, who criticizes the “abstract laziness and bliss of Shakespeare’s dreams”, the novice writer turns the obscene satirical language of Barkoviana against his guardian in a sharp pamphlet style. Continuing his observations on common people’s speech in the Siberian Notebook and the Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky came to a paradoxical conclusion about the combination of profanity and chastity in the Russian people. The writer’s viewpoint on this matter was not clear to his contemporaries and was ridiculed in journalism and caricature.

In August 1831, the parents of Fyodor Dostoevsky purchased an estate in the Kashirsky district of the Tula Province, consisting of the hamlet of Darovoe and the village of Darovaya. In February 1833, they bought the neighboring village of Cheremoshnya. The entire property, including the above-named villages and hamlet, also included land plots in the wastelands: Nechaeva, Trypillya, Harina, Shelepova and Chertkova. Having become the owners of 58 peasant souls and more than 500 dessiatines of land, the Dostoevskys were considered average local landowners. However, Darovoe, well-known as the childhood place of the writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, remains poorly studied from an economic point of view. One of the reasons is that today there are very few documents that could reliably indicate the economic condition of the estate for the memorial period. An exception is the monograph of V. S. Nechaeva “In the Dostoevsky family and estate,” published in 1939, where, based on the correspondence of M. F. Dostoevskaya and M. A. Dostoevsky, the author claims that the estate they acquired was not merely unprofitable, but also caused a family tragedy. The opinion of V. S. Nechaeva became fundamental for researchers of the writer’s biography. However, this issue can be revised today, which is what the presented work is devoted to. The correspondence of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parents, the letters of his older brother M. M. Dostoevsky, who was the guardian over the estate and the Memoirs of the younger brother of A. M. Dostoevsky in the aggregate allow to take a fresh look at the estate and the income it brought. In the context of this problem, it is of interest to refer to the newly published “Report of the headman of the village of Darovoe Savin Makarov to Mikhail Mikhailovich Dostoevsky” dated October 8, 1850. The document was discovered in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and complements the well-known sources on the economic condition of the Dostoevsky estate.

The article is devoted to the issue of the schism in the Vremya and Epokha journals published by the brothers Fyodor and Mikhail Dostoevskys. The content of the articles and reviews published in them is considered from the viewpoint of pochvennichestvo (native soil) position of the publications. The stance of their editorial board is formulated in the Announcement about the publication of the Vremya journal in 1861, which became a program document. The main concept of Vremya, as well as the Epokha journal that followed it, was the need to merge the educated part of society with the people. There was a spiritual, political and social gap, a split between them, which was caused not only by the church reform of the 17th-century, but also by subsequent state reforms that caused people’s rejection. The idea of the Dostoevskys’ journals was to get to know the people, recognize their originality, appeal to the native principle, pochva (soil), the communal form of life, the synthesis of the ideas developed in Europe, which will find their development in the Russian narodnost’ (Russian people). These thoughts were absorbed by F. M. Dostoevsky’s idea of enhanced knowledge of Russia, which was reflected in his article “Two Camps of Theorists.” Using the publications in the Vremya and Epokha journals, it is demonstrated that the concept of split (schism) in the minds of the 19th-century authors was much broader than the historical phenomenon caused by the 17th-century church reform. They consider the split not only as a religious, but also as a social and political phenomenon that requires deep research and rectification, a synthesis of European and popular principles.

The article deals with the history of the sale of the real estate property belonging to A. F. Kumanina, the Moscow aunt of F. M. Dostoevsky, in the Tula province. The division of the property received by her heirs after her death was to be carried out after their entry into the ownership of the estates: first Tula, then Smolensk and Ryazan, which were pledged. Lawyers played a criminal role in this process. They developed an illegal scheme during the division and sale of the house and land plot in Tula, which predetermined the fate of the Kumanin inheritance, most of which was spent on paying debts, arrears and attorney fees. In connection with the inheritance case, F. M. Dostoevsky sought legal assistance from V. P. Gaevsky, V. I. Veselovsky, B. B. Polyakov, V. I. Gubin, E. V. Korsh, A. V. Lokhvitsky, V. I. Lustikh. The facts testifying to the unseemly role of the attorneys, which ultimately led to the unexpected outcome of the “Kumanin story,” are presented in the memoirs and correspondence of the writer’s brother Andrey Mikhailovich. They are also indicated in the correspondence of the other heirs of A. F. Kumanina, including F. M. Dostoevsky and his closest relatives, who tried to regain the right to own hereditary estates, as well as the materials of the genealogic inventory of N. S. Lazarev-Stanishchev, who became one of the participants in the “Kumanin inheritance” scam. The Appendix contains a previously unpublished letter from D. A. Smirnov, assistant to attorney V. I. Veselovsky in the “case of the Kumanin inheritance,” to A. M. Dostoevsky dated February 10, 1874 about the sale of the Kumanin house in Tula.

The article analyzes newspaper and magazine materials about schools named after F. M. Dostoevsky (1881–1917). Most of the publications concern the history of the parish school in Staraya Russa, but the authors found out that at the turn of the 20th century several more attempts were made to open an educational institution in memory of the writer, namely in Kiev and Kazan provinces. The article provides a brief overview of the history of other schools that ever bore the name of F. M. Dostoevsky (Shkid in Petrograd, a gymnasium in Harbin, a school in Dostoevo, school No. 2 in Staraya Russa, school No. 1148 in Moscow). During this period, the press began a broad discussion of the idea of perpetuating the writer’s memory by opening public schools named in his honor; thanks to the initiative of “Novoe Vremya” newspaper, a fundraising campaign was initiated to establish the first school in Staraya Russa. The accents and assessments of the Russian press are of particular value: they are an expression of both the public attitude towards F. M. Dostoevsky, and a means of preserving the nation’s memory of him. The press materials allow to track the attitude of people to the heritage of F. M. Dostoevsky and to establish the motifs that inspired representatives of various social strata to donate funds for the construction of schools in memory of the writer. The following sources are used as a foundation: chronicles, reports and other texts from the newspapers “Novoe Vremya,” “Moskovskie Vedomosti,” “Kazansky Telegraph,” “Nedelya,” “Volzhsky Vestnik,” “Starorusskaya Pravda,” “Volkhovsky Listok,” “Kazanskie Gubernskie Vedomosti”; articles from the magazines “Istorichesky Vestnik,” “Novgorodskiye eparhialnye Vedomosti,” and others.