Vol 5, No 2 (2018)

The article examines the question of significance of the history of the Dostoevsky dynasty on the lands of Grand Duchy of Lithuania while studying F. M. Dostoevsky’s literary heritage. It can be considered as a real source of the religious and philosophical problems exposed in the writer’s creative works. The structure of historical destinies of three East Slavic peoples formed by world view extremes created a polemic scope with centuries-old background which potentially seems to follow a catastrophic scenario. In this aspect the imaginative polysemy of the “polyphonic” picture of the world in the writings of F. M. Dostoevsky, where belief and mind aren’t separated by an ideological and political axis of the evil, but located in a stream of direct human experience and states, can become a necessary condition to avoid unilaterality and tendentiousness while judging the problem of the existence of Southwest Rus’ as a part of Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The article is devoted to the Kuznetsk post office and its head, postmaster P. F. Baigashev, (Baigishev), who was called “formalist” by Dostoevsky in his letter to A. E. Wrangel on August 23, 1855. The author discovered previously unknown facts about this official, his family and friends, his awards, career progression. This research work covers biographical information about a certain postal official, historical facts on life of the Postal Department, as well as everyday details of the Kuznetsk post office and the town of Kuznetsk in Tomsk province, as a whole. Some names of Kuznetsk postmen and archival documents are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. The research is based on the study of documentary sources of the state archive of the Tomsk region (registers of births, reports of city chiefs, circulars, business letters, statements, lists, etc.) and collections of statistical data in the mid-to-late 19th century, stored in the library collections of Tomsk and Moscow.

In 2018, the Decree of the Ministry of Labour and Social Protection of the Russian Federation abolished the profession of a stenographer due to the absence of demand. Researchers of the creative work of Fyodor Dostoevsky cherish the memory of two female stenographers — the writer’s collaborator Anna Dostoevskaya and Cecilia Poshemanskaya, a modest stenographer from Leningrad that managed to find the key to the shorthand system of the former. In the 1950s-1970s Poshemanskaya disclosed to the public the diary of Anna Dostoevskaya of 1867, the rough copies of “A Writer’s Diary” and “The Brothers Karamazov” and some more pages written shorthand by the writer’s assistant. The information on Poshemanskaya and her long-term, broad scale work in the memory of Dostoevsky is scarce. This article gives a brief description of the main stages of her creative career of the stenographer from Leningrad. Some additional details on life and work of Poshemanskaya are available in the documents kept in the fund of historianregistrar Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya (10239-fund). Principally, in the letters of Poshemanskaya to Vera M. Fyodorova and Sarra V. Zhitomirskaya, employees of the Manuscript Department of the V. I. Lenin State Library. The fragments of Poshemanskaya’s letters and her two letters to Vera M. Fyodorova published in the article’s supplement throw light upon the methods of the stenographer’s work and assign the objective to use her experience while decoding shorthand notes from the Dostoevsky archive as well as other historic stenographs.