№ 1, 2015 year

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.Dostoevsky, correspondence, epistolary genre, text, literary allusion

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.codicology, information technologies, optoelectronic textual criticism, Dostoevsky, manuscripts, epistolary heritage, reconstruction of the text

There are left only isolated, minor documents on the official investigation of an unexpected death of M.A. Dostoevsky, the writer’s father. Among others, cause of death statement. Based on forensic-medical instructions we reconstruct the context and try to read the resolution part of the forensic medical opinion of Kashira district physician I.I.Shenkneht, reveal internal consistency of the text, as well as its conformity with the ideas and rules of the first half of the 19th century.text and context, discursive practics, contextual reading, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky

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.regional study, St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky's addresses, source criticism, archival search, memoirs, epistolary heritage, address books

A reader’s letter V.I. Nikolsky to the author reveals one of the aspects of F.M. Dostoevsky’s creative work, that is when an admirer and a fellow-thinker keenly reads and teaches the author, expresses original judgements on Russia, people, the author as a harbinger of new philosophy.Dostoevsky, reader, author, prophet, people, preaching, admonition

The Manuscript Department of the Pushkin House (the Institute of Russian Culture. 100 fund. № 29790. Folio 1) keeps a letter of a young district doctor V.I. Nikolsky to F.M. Dostoevsky dated back to October 25, 1880 from Abakumovka village of Tambov province. The first complete publication of the letter is accompanied with an article that makes an attempt to write a biography of one of the numerous readers and the most vehement and ardent admirer of F.M. Dostoevsky’s works, who wrote the words of encouragement to him because of extremely negative comments and opinions of literary critics that appeared after the publication of the writer’s famous Pushkin speech. The article considers the largest range of sources, reference books, area studies, dictionaries available at the moment, and also provides critical reviews of them. The data reveals typical and at the same time extraordinary destiny of one of the Russian district executives.Fyodor Dostoevsky, V. I. Nikolsky, correspondence, biography, writer, reader