The Presidential Library’s collections: “Dostoevsky is world’s expresser of all the depths of the Russian spirit”

According to school curricula we remember the first stories by Dostoevsky: ““Fog, slush. Rain pours from the gloomy, hostile sky, as well as sleet shower. The wind is shrilling in the dark". A gloomy, isolate melancholy fills the soul. Along with Dostoevsky you begin to love this melancholy with some kind of special, painful love”, - writes V. Veresaev in the publication Living Life: About Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (1922), an electronic copy of which is available on the Presidential Library’s portal.  

November 11, 2018 marks the 197th anniversary of the birth of Russian writer, thinker and publicist Fyodor Dostoevsky, Corresponding Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences since 1877. The electronic collection “F. M. Dostoevsky (1821–1881). The World of Dostoevsky”, including digital copies of the texts of his works, materials about life and work, research papers of the last century, and abstracts of theses of our days is available on the Presidential library’s portal.

Having decided, after graduating from the Engineering School in St. Petersburg, to devote himself entirely to literature, Dostoevsky starts writing the novel The Poor Folk, and after a series of alterations that are painful for an inexperienced writer, gives it to the press. Stunning success! A literary circle has been formed almost immediately around the novice writer. But young Dostoevsky was looking for answers to the “accursed questions” beyond the boundaries of fiction: in the spring of 1847 he became a visitor to the “Fridays” of M. V. Petrashevsky.  

Participation in organizing a hedge press for printing appeals to the peasants and soldiers was not without consequences: Dostoevsky, among other Petrashevists, was arrested in April 1849. He spent eight months in the Alekseevsky District of the Peter and Paul Fortress under investigation. The situation reached its highest tension on December 22, 1849, when the writer, together with his fellow Petrashevists, was waiting for the execution of the death sentence on Semenovsky parade ground. However, at the behest of Nicholas I, the penalty was replaced by a 4-year hard labor with the deprivation of "all rights of the state" and the subsequent surrender to the soldiers.

This period is described in the article by A. P. Milyukov “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky” published in one of the issues of the historical journal Russian Antiquity in 1881. The author - a writer, literary historian, a critic - visited Dostoevsky in the fortress: “The rifle butts of guns broke out and, accompanied by an officer, F. M. Dostoevsky and S. F. Durov entered. We shook hands warmly. Despite the eight-month imprisonment in the casemates, they almost did not change: the same serious calm on their faces ... Neither the slightest complaint was expressed by the austerity of the trial or the severity of the sentence”.   

Hard labor in exile, noted literary friends, did not harden the writer, but only accelerated the maturation of civic qualities. “Dostoevsky before going to Siberia is a young engineering officer who had an outstanding literary talent. <...> A completely different person came back from Siberia - not only a great writer whose talent was hardened in the furnace of true, not invented, suffering, but also a man of unbending civil courage”, “Dostoevsky’s spiritual birth in Siberia: The Book of Fate "Notes from the House of the Dead"" (2014).

"... To what extent the hard labor en exile reborn his youthful convictions", - also testified in 1917 the magazine "Sovremenny Mir", with which the writer collaborated after returning from Siberia. “Humiliated and offended” is the first great work of this period.

The electronic collection also includes modern research papers on the literary oeuvre of the classic. Among them are abstracts of dissertations on the themes of “The Gospel Parable in the Author's Discourse of F. M. Dostoevsky”, “Confession as a Principle of the Formation of the Poetics of F. M. Dostoevsky’s Fiction”, “The Art Logic of Shame in the Prose of F. M. Dostoevsky”, “Notes from Underground“ by F. M. Dostoevsky in the context of the author’s myth of the rebellion” and many others. O. Danilenko reflects on the Logic of psychological analysis in the works of Dostoevsky in the thesis abstract: “Psychological analysis in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky was formed on the basis of a deep philosophical and religious understanding of the problems of conscience, willfulness, freedom and suffering in human destiny, tragic inconsistency in the existential perfect ad real world".  

On the basis of this approach, Crime and Punishment, the Brothers Karamazov and the Possessed were written. In these works, according to A. Zakrzhevsky, a researcher of Dostoevsky’s works, the writer “measured the depths of ... passion and gave a picture of failures in such a subsoil, where the burning of the flesh becomes the fire of the spirit".

“Perceiving, like no one, the suffering soul of a Russian man, from whatever social stratum he was”, - wrote Baron M. Taube in the article “Memorandum of F. M. Dostoevsky” (1906), F. M. loved entirely this Russian man, his soul and his capabilities”.

The Presidential Library’s portal provides access to the collection of issues of the journal “Diary of a Writer” for 1877, where all the most pressing problems that at that time troubled the Russian intelligentsia were reflected. Objecting to Western opponents, Dostoevsky wrote: “Our people are intelligent and quiet, and besides, they don’t want war at all, but only sympathize with their oppressed brothers for the faith of Christ from a warm heart, but if it is necessary, if the great word of the king is heard, then go ... and do everything in one gust, like one. So, this kind of unity force, in view of the mysterious future of Europe’s destinations, cannot but be appreciated and contemplated before us in moments of some involuntary considerations and our fortune telling”.

The works of Dostoevsky, his views as a writer and a citizen give an idea of ​​such works from the Presidential Library’s collections as “Tasks of the Russian People” (1894), “Memorandum of F. M. Dostoevsky” (1906) by M. F. Taube, “The Legend of The Grand Inquisitor of F. M. Dostoevsky" (1894), "Dostoevsky and Herzen in the history of Russian self-consciousness" (1907) by T. Y. Ganzhulevich.

In the last of these works, Taisia ​​Ganzhulevich draws attention to Dostoevsky’s perception of Peter’s reforms: “The history of a people is the history of its self-awareness and the wider the richer it develops, the more powerful the global role of this people is drawn to us. <...> Dostoevsky sees the peculiarities of the Russian people even in the reform of Peter the Great, in the “broadening of the gaze” introduced by it. “This”, - writes Dostoevsky, - is not enlightenment in the proper sense of the word and not betraying the popular Russian principles — this is peculiar to the Russian people only; for there has never been such a reform anywhere. This is actually almost our brotherly love for other nations, it is our need for all-service to humanity, even to the detriment of sometimes our own and large immediate interests"".

In a very interesting study “Karamazovschina. Psychological parallels: Dostoevsky. Valery Bryusov. V. V. Rozanov. M. Artsybashev" (1912) A. Zakrzhevsky managed to formulate the true strength and scale of the writer: "Dostoevsky ... has become the inspiration and starting point of almost all of our writers, poets, and philosophers. Not in our poverty, not in the impoverishment of creative forces, it is necessary to discern the cause of this influence, but in the unusually strong relationship of all Russian creativity with Dostoevsky's personality. In this regard, Dostoevsky is the world’s expresser of all the depths of the Russian spirit, the ingenious creator of all the wandering, hidden, mysterious forces, a living symbol of the mysterious tsardom of the Russian soul and people, his strivings and his hopes”.