Кто скрывался за «векселем Пантелеевой»: атрибуция и датировка писем из архива Достоевского (1860–1870-е гг.)
Who Was Behind “Panteleeva’s Promissory Note”: Attribution and Dating of Letters from Dostoevsky’s Archive (1860s–1870s)

Summary/Abstract: Using the example of a letter to Dostoevsky from M. Papkov — the holder of three promissory notes, including Panteleeva’s note — the article presents a step-by-step methodology for dating (redating) undated letters from Dostoevsky’s archive and for attributing little-known correspondents and mentioned persons. It proved impossible to establish the date of this letter based solely on its content. More productive proved to be not an isolated analysis of the document, but its immersion into context: either into the epistolary dialogue with Dostoevsky, or into the body of letters united by a common chronology or a specific theme (correspondence with relatives, publishers, printers, booksellers, authors, or subscribers). It was the second approach that helped to convincingly redate the letter of Mikhail Nikolaevich Papkov — assistant to the attorney-at-law, manufacturer, publisher, and bookseller Evgeny Petrovich Pechatkin, who represented the financial interests of his elder brothers. It was through Papkov that Pechatkin presented to Dostoevsky, in late autumn 1872, three overdue promissory notes that the writer had issued in 1864–1865 while publishing the journal “Epokha” (“Epocha”). Both letters turned out to be linked by a single occasion and time of writing. In the course of the research, the erroneous dating of the autograph (“in the course of 1865”) adopted in the previous scholarly tradition was corrected, as well as the erroneous attribution of the sender in reference works (“L. Papkova”), which led to the inclusion of incorrect information in her biography. As a result, new biographical data were obtained about two persons from Dostoevsky’s milieu in the 1860s–1870s: M. N. Papkov and the writer’s creditor from the mid-1860s, Panteleeva, and the corpus of correspondence for the period under study (1867–1875) was supplemented by another letter by M. N. Papkov, written between November 19 and 22, 1872.

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