Graphic Aspects of Textual Interpretation of Dostoevsky’s Handwritten Text

The article discusses the issues of textual interpretation of Dostoevsky’s handwritten text using the writer’s graphics as research materials. It presents the results of the analysis of Dostoevsky’s 1868–1869 workbook (“The Idiot”) and later entries. It became clear that without reference to handwritten sources, it is impossible to solve certain tasks that include the correction of research errors in reading Dostoevsky’s manuscripts and determination of the author’s original text. Methodologically significant conditions of textual work with autographs are a combination of linguistic (that is grammatical, spelling, punctuation) analysis of Dostoevsky’s drafts and the study of letter and non-letter graphics. Previously, researchers had to depend on isolated, accidentally discovered examples of similar spellings and, in general, on their accumulated experience of reading Dostoevsky’s handwriting. This method did not ensure the representativeness of the result, because there was no large-scale continuous sampling of each letter’s handwriting in different positions or summary tables or databases. Non-automated, “manual” analysis did not always allow to quickly find an unambiguous and reliably articulated solution. Today a graphics database on the “Archive of F. M. Dostoevsky” portal has become an important tool for the textual research of the writer’s manuscripts, which significantly increases work efficiency. This is a digital archive of images of the writer’s notebooks and their interpretation in authentic and modern language versions. Based on this archive, a replenishable “Library of graphic samples” is also being created. It contains samples of different types of the writer’s handwriting and nonverbal graphics (drawings, figures, author’s signs, editing marks). The electronic catalog of graphic samples allows to systematize the writing, find typical and atypical samples among them. This is an additional important criterion for the argumentation of certain research readings when interpreting Dostoevsky’s handwritten text. Technical tools have been developed specifically for the database, that is: marker fields that describe the individual parameters of each lexeme and allow conducting an advanced search in the “Library of Graphic Samples.” With its help, it is possible to quickly find all patterns of the same type for their further analysis. Thus, this resource will become an important tool in the complex graphic and linguotextological analysis of the writer’s handwritten material.