Anna Dostoevskaya’s Notebooks: Published and Overlooked

The article presents an overview of a little-researched archival source — the notebooks of Anna Dostoevskaya. About 100 notebooks kept by the writer’s wife have been preserved in Moscow and St. Petersburg archives. They were created between 1875 and 1917, covering the last five years of Dostoevsky’s life and the time after his death. However, they did not arouse much interest among researchers due to the prevalence of economic and business records in them. Selected entries and pages were published by L. P. Grossman, I. L. Volgin, S. V. Belov, T. N. Ornatskaya, A. V. Arkhipova, I. S. Andrianova, T. V. Panyukova. Many records of undoubted historical and literary significance still haven’t been introduced into scientific circulation, among them sketches of excerpts from “A Writer’s Diary” and memories of Dostoevsky; lists of types of his favorite places and paintings, pharmacy prescriptions; pasted or rewritten letters from readers and documents of the Dostoevsky family; records related to the movement of the writer’s manuscripts, books and the belongings after his death, and to his widow’s work to create the first in Russia “Dostoevsky Memorial Museum,” to establish a school named after him in Staraya Russa, and others. The article provides examples of unpublished records that are of value for biographers (the names of Dostoevsky’s servants in 1875–1876, Maria of Baden’s, Princess Maria Maximilianovna of Leuchtenberg, impression of the writer’s work and death, Dostoevsky’s words remembered by his widow, a rough sketch for his memoirs). Based on the study of economic notes by A. G. Dostoevskaya, it is hypothesized that Dostoevsky’s maid Lukerya could have been the prototype of a servant with the same name from the ‘fantastic short story’ “A Gentle Creature” and the novel “The Adolescent.” A letter written by A. G. Dostoevskaya to E. F. Junge whose autograph is lost was discovered in one of the notebooks. A. G. Dostoevskaya’s notebooks are a genuine treasure trove of materials related to Dostoevsky and his era. They required research, systematization, chronological attribution and publication.