Vol 4, No 1 (2017)

Lots of anonymous articles were published in the periodicals edited by Dostoevsky in the 1860s–1870s. Traditional methods of their attribution often turn out to be ineffective. As a rule, discussing this issue researchers try to decide definitely who one or another article belongs to, but they do not take into consideration a specific character and practical aspects of journalistic and editorial work of those times, prerequisites and conditions of publication of articles, their genre singularity. Almost all the anonymous articles in these periodicals were editorial, written by editors or employees and authors under a commission of the editor in chief. Sometimes the editors office bought someone else’s text and revised it. The given articles manifested the journal’s policy, put into force ideas and instructions of the editor in chief. The authorship of the articles did not matter. The author was deprived of his rights for the article, which became the journal’s property. Thus, it is advisable to consider the editorials as a particular genre meant to formulate the journal’s policy, bring its program into effect, and implement the editor’s instructions. Their attribution is possible but not necessary. Among the anonymous articles in the journals “Vremya” and “Epokha” and the weekly “Grazhdanin” the most distinguished are the publications of F. M. Dostoevsky, as well as those prepared in collaboration with the following co-editors — M. M. Dostoevsky (“Vremya”, “Epokha”) and V. P. Meshchersky (“Grazhdanin”). In the editorial domain, the leading role belonged to F. M. Dostoevsky. As a specific genre, the given articles should be published and included into actual editions on history of Russian literature and journalism.

A dynamic process of professionalization of literary activity in the 19th century involved female writers as well. In contrast to the opinion of many of his fellow reviewers and writers, F. M. Dostoevsky considered female education a way to moral renewal of Mankind and approved of women’s involvement in literary activity. Such a viewpoint of Dostoevsky used to evoke women’s confidence and encourage them to write to him in search of moral support and a trustworthy opinion. The Russian archives keep the letters of more than 20 female writers addressed to Dostoevsky. The authors of two of them remain unidentified up to now. The study of the letter of the third correspondent of Dostoevsky, an emerging author, unknown before, who sent to Dostoevsky the manuscripts of her writings in response to the review, has resulted in the attribution appeared in the given article. Having carried out textual analysis of the autograph, examined documentary, biographic, historic and literary sources, information of genealogy websites, the author has brought to a focuse and adduced arguments in favor of the opinion that the letter to Dostoevsky dated back to March 7th, 1877 and signed with a cryptonym M. Z. (in the text of the letter referred to as M. F. Z.) belongs to Maria Florianovna Kharkeevich (whose maiden name was Zavadskaya). She lived in the village Shatalovka of Voronezh province, in the estate of her husband Yakov Alekseevich Kharkeevich. Thus, the extant Kharkeevich mansion in the village Shatalovka as well as being an architectural landmark of the 19th century, takes on a new significance of a site of memory in the Russian rural area where the female author used to write letters to Dostoevsky.

Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya (nee Nechaeva), mother of the great writer, died on March 11th (February 27th), 1837. She was buried at the first public graveyard in Moscow — Lazarev cemetery, the largest one until 1917. In the 1930s this cemetery was ravaged, and the writer’s mother’s remains were subjected to a barbaric exhumation. The tombstone was kept for a long time in the cellar of the State Literary Museum. The given article covers the history of reconstruction of the tombstone of M. F. Dostoevskaya. This cultural and historical event occurred on March 11th, 2017 in the territory of the former Lazarev cemetery in Moscow, near the Holy Spirit Temple. The reconstruction of M.F.Dostoevskaya’s grave is not only the reconstruction of a place of memory of the Dostoevsky dynasty, but is also evocation of recollections of all the buried in the destroyed Lazarev cemetery.