Vol 4, No 4 (2017)

The article is devoted to the problems of textual criticism based on the material of the notebooks of F. M. Dostoevsky of the years 1864–1870 and their first publications. The research paper allows us to reveal the common factors of formation of the textological principles of preparing of Dostoevsky’s manuscript heritage for publishing. The work envisages the problems of the first reading of autographs and the specificity of repercussions of their linguistic characteristics in scientific publications of the 1930s. Also in the article the mistakes of interpretation of the original text are corrected, the principles of text graphic highlighting in print are clarified. In addition to the earlier publications the materials of the academic Complete works of Dostoevsky are taken into consideration. The article presents the results of the analysis of the creative process of the writer seen in the rough version. It also studies the problem of reconstruction of order of author’s notes in the first and subsequent publications of his autographs.

In the early 1860s a notable phenomenon of social life in Russia was the struggle of women for the right to visit universities and obtain higher education. F. M. Dostoevsky was

«for» the changes in the public consciousness that were in process at this time, and thus, supported the desire of the girls of that time to work and study, at the same time denying the revolutionary ways of achieving this goal. It was no coincidence that on the pages of journals edited along with his brother Mikhail («Vremya», 1861–1863, «Epokha», 1864–1865) he published articles and essays on female education and the «women’s question» in general. Dostoevsky was personally acquainted with a lot of bright representatives of a «new» generation, such as the sisters Natalia Ieronimovna and Ekaterina Ieronimovna Corsini, Nadezhda Prokofievna Suslova and her sister Apollinaria. Existing letters of some of the mentioned girls to the writer testify his friendliness to them. Fyodor Mikhailovich knew also the sisters Korvin-Krukovsky, who left a large footprint in the history of women’s education. All these girls (with the exception of E. Corsini) were engaged in writing. Their diaries, memoirs, letters and literary experiments vividly illustrate the process of the formation of women’s self-awareness, their hard way to education and work. This study is an attempt to systematize and analyze the facts of the biography of female noncredit students at the beginning of the 1860s through their correlation with life and work of the writer.

For the first time the article deals with the experience of the annotated edition of Dostoevsky’s address records contained in workbooks and other manuscript materials of the writer’s archive. All the records are reproduced thanks to autographs with the indication of the archival storage sites. Regional commentaries with the use of address books and other printed resources of those times (tables of the buildings, guidebooks, reference books etc) allowed making correction in the range of wrong textual interpretations of the previous publications. The commentaries reconstructed as full as possible historical addresses of people and organizations appeared in Dostoevsky’s manuscripts, specified personal data of the addressees. In dozens of cases are given the house owners’ names and exact numbers of the houses, in certain cases even of the apartments. The modern position of the annotated addresses is spotted on the map of St. Petersburg.

The importance of stenography, i. e. the art of writing at speech rate, is widely recognized in the history of evolution of the world science and culture, politics and economy. The given article systematizes the facts about the writers of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries who mastered the shorthand or used to resort to the help of professional stenographers in their creative activities. Taking into consideration this review the article makes a conclusion about the role and meaning of stenography in the creative process of F. M. Dostoevsky. He was the second writer in Russia (following V. V. Krestovsky) who applied shorthand writing in his literary work, but the only one in the world literature for whom stenography became something more than just shorthand. He considered it to be mysterious and “high art”. It modified and enriched the model of his creative process not for a while but for life, and it had an influence on the poetics of novels and of the story “A Gentle Creature”, it contributed changes in the writer’s private life and provoke the relatives’ interest (stepson P. A. Isaev, niece E. M. Dostoevskaya). In the course of the marriage of Dostoevsky and stenographer A. G. Snitkina the author’s artistic talent came to the peak. The largest and most important part of his body of work was created in that period. Unfortunately, the Dostoevsky archive keeps only a moderate part of the manuscripts with stenographic notes in them. It is described in the supplement to the article.