The Unknown Dostoevsky

8

Authors: Irina S. Andrianova

Letters by Fyodor and Anna Dostoevsky were first published in a series "Literary monuments". Before, F. Dostoevsky’s letters used to be published separately. In the above-mentioned edition the letters of the spouses are arranged in a chronological order and represent compositional wholeness that resembles an epistolary novel with certain storyline logic. For the first time the article makes an attempt to study letters by Fyodor and Anna Dostoevsky not within the frame of a biographical approach but as an integral dialogical text characterized by compositional, thematic and stylistic uniformity, and created by two corresponding co-authors. Among the tasks of this research there is also analysis of stylistic peculiarities and the topics of Anna Dostoevskaya. Both a published source of the letters and manuscripts of the spouses Dostoevsky kept in Russian archives served as materials for the research.

12-25

Authors: Viktor F. Molchanov

When studying the manuscript heritage of any author the task of deciphering of the texts unavailable for visual reading arises. These are author’s and censor’s strikethrough texts, field labels, erasures, various corrections, decay of the text when in storage. Modern information technologies and optoelectronic methods considerably enhance opportunities for studying hand-written texts and provide scholars with new tools of basic disciplines, such as source studies, paleography, archaeography, codicology and textual criticism. The Manuscript Department of the National Library of Russia elaborated a technique of examination and description of the documents, preparation of the publications, among them facsimile, that permits to conduct researches on the reconstruction of incomplete texts, to give an expert opinion on technical, editorial and other modifications of the manuscripts, to restore an original, authentic text of the resource. The article presents the results of codicological analysis of Dostoevsky’s manuscripts: the description of an optoelectronic method for reconstruction of the strikethrough fragments of the hand-written text, the restored strikethrough fragments in the letters of F.M.Dostoevsky to A.E. Vrangel dated by March 23, 1856, July 14, 1856, March 9, 1857 are published.

65

Authors: Boris N. Tikhomirov

This series of two articles represents a systematic and complex analysis of the information on F.M. Dostoevsky’s addresses in Saint Petersburg. All the variety of existing archive documents is applied taking into consideration the peculiarities of presenting address and topographic data in the documents and printed publications of the 19th century. Memoirs and epistolary testimonies are necessarily exposed to a critical review. St. Petersburg addresses of Dostoevsky are explored in a chronological order, from 1837 until 1881. The address of the house where the writer lived is defined as precisely as possible and a contemporary address of that dwelling is given. The houses, that remained intact, are provided with the dates of their construction and later reconstructions. If a historic house of the Dostoevsky epoch has not come down to the present day the date of the construction of a new one in the same place is specified. The corpus of documentary records and their critical reviewing is an essential part of the analytic description of each address. Wherever possible, some details of an address are revealed, such as an apartment and a storey number, the number of rooms and so on. Special attention is focused on the characteristics of the householders.