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Rewriting Dostoevsky's Letters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2017
Extract
In 1956 the Soviet Union commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. His re-entry on the Soviet literary scene was marked by the publication of his Collected Works in an imposing ten-volume edition of 300,000 copies. Concurrently, biographical and critical studies began appearing once again, most of them, to be sure, of only secondary significance, but their sheer number is impressive compared to the drought years 1935-56. Little has appeared, however, which bears comparison with the wealth of critical literature and memoir materials that characterized the immediate postrevolutionary period to 1935, particularly that connected with the names of A. S. Dolinin and L. P. Grossman. These two scholars are still active today, and both participated in the preparation of the ten-volume edition.
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1961
References
1 Dostoevsky, F. M., Pis'ma, Dolinin, A. S., ed., Vol. IV (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1959).Google Scholar
2 Erroneously given by Dolinin as 1888.
3 Unless indicated otherwise, the 1926 Pereverzev edition of Dostoevsky's letters to his wife.
4 In the original version the Russian text is odin zhidok doktor, which in Volume IV becomes odin <evrej> doktor. The word evrej has been placed in brackets, indicating an insertion made by the editors. This modified version would be translated as“one doctor (a Jew)” and carries no pejorative meaning.
5 The Russian word kagal, a derivative of the Hebrew word gahal (meeting), is not readily translatable. In old Poland and the Polish regions of tsarist Russia, it signified an assembly of Jewish elders, charged with the judicial and administrative affairs of the Jewish communes. In its figurative meaning, it denotes a noisy and disorderly gathering or crowd. In the present context, it is decidedly derogatory.
6 Evrej or evrejskij in the original.
7 The inadequacy of this explanation is also indicated by the fact that there have been no textual modifications in the 1956 popular edition of Dostoevsky's Collected Works. Like the Letters, it was published by Goslitizdat. Had there been a high-level decision to delete non-complimentary references to the Jews, they would most certainly have been eliminated from his Collected Works as well, the more so since it reached a wide reading public.
8 See Dostoevskij, F. M. : : Materialy i issledovanija, Dolinin, A. S., ed. (Leningrad, 1935), p. 49.Google Scholar
9 Grossman Cf., L. P., Ispoved' odnogo evreja (Moscow-Leningrad, 1924), Appendix (‘Dostoevsky and Judaism’), pp. 165–81;Google Scholar Grossman, L. P., “Dostoevskij i pravitel&stvennye krugi 70-kh godov,” Literaturnoye nasledstvo, Moscow, No. 15, 1934, pp. 108–14;Google Scholar Gornfel'd, A., “Dostoevskij, Fyodor Mikhailovich,” Evrejskaja enciklopedija (St. Petersburg: Brockhaus-Efron, n.d.), Vol. VII, Cols. 310–14;Google Scholar Z. Shteinberg, A., “Dostoevskij i evrejstvo,” Vyorsty (Paris, Editions Eurasie, No. 3, 1928), pp. 94–108.Google Scholar
10 The Merezhkovskys and the Rozanovs have made Dostoevsky their own, have created him in their own image and likeness, have used him as a weapon of the class struggle, actually defending obscurantism, anti-Semitism, the clergy.” F. M. Dostoevski]: Materialy i issledovanija, p. 24.