Dostoevsky's Letters to His Wife: the Problem of Censorial Corrections Cover Image

Письма Достоевского к жене: проблема цензурных исправлений
Dostoevsky's Letters to His Wife: the Problem of Censorial Corrections

Author(s): Irina Svyatoslavovna Andrianova
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Russian Literature, Philology
Published by: Петрозаводский государственный университет
Keywords: Dostoevsky;Anna G. Dostoevskaya; epistolary heritage; censorial corrections; textual criticism;

Summary/Abstract: Dostoevskaya became a gatherer and a keeper of the writer’s private archive and of other papers referred to his name. She took care of this collection for their descendants’ good and kept enlarging it till the day she died. Along with this, the Dostoevsky archive that has come down to us contains manuscripts revised by his widow. This refers to Dostoevsky’s letters to her. The article analyses certain corrections made by Anna Dostoevskaya in the letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky addressed to her. The article aims at specifying the initial text of Dostoevsky’s letters written to his wife in 1873, by means of reading the crossed out words and lines in the text, and defining the prospects of future textual studies of the manuscripts. Transcribing process was realized by using traditional (visual) methods of text reading and analysis. The purpose of the article is to explore the reasons that had encouraged the writer’s widow to serve as an editor and a censor of Dostoevsky’s letters. The archive materials were used when preparing the article, among others the papers unknown to the academic community (copies of the letters of Dostoevsky to his wife and her remarks to those letters).

  • Issue Year: 1/2014
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 66-72
  • Page Count: 16
  • Language: English, Russian