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An Unknown Letter by Dostoevsky
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An Unknown Letter by Dostoevsky With an Introduction by Vladimir Zakharov "Neizvestnoe pis'mo Dostoevskogo," Literatumaia gazeta, no. 24 (10 June 2009) (http:/www.lgz.ru/artic le/91 69/). Dostoevsky's archives contain many unsolved mysteries. A number of documents disappeared during the years of the Civil War, including a precious manuscript of the novel The Brothers Karamazov-an incalculable loss. The archives contain empty envelopes with the letters missing, and the writer's correspondence with many people has been lost. Those materials that do occasionally turn up enable us to restore omitted names to their rightful place in the record, to establish connections among disparate events, and to correct errors in published texts. New discoveries also give rise to new problems. Our work preparing the new Complete Collected Works of Dostoevsky (Canonical Texts) in the author's original orthography and punctuation has led us into many archives, both domestic and foreignI New and "lost" texts and documents have corne to light, and we have been able to establish Dostoevsky's authorship of a number of anonymous articles published in the journals Time and Citizen. Some unpublished examples of Dostoevsky's writing remain in the hands of private individuals, and they occasionally surface at auctions held by Christie's and Sotheby's. Our own archives and libraries also offer occasional surprises. For whatever reason, Dostoevsky scholars had not looked into the International Policy Archive of the Russian Empire (AVPRI). If they had, they would have long ago discovered and published the letter introduced below. 1. Vinogradov, a scholar who has been discovering previously unknown writings by Gogo!. drew my attention to its existence. And indeed, AVPRI was found to contain copies of two letters by Dostoevsky that were made before the Revolution (at the turn of the twentieth century) on a Remington typewriter . One of the letters, whicl1 Dostoevsky wrote to students of Moscow University on 18/30 April 1877, had been published in a newspaper and was known to scholars. The original of the other letter had been lost. 1 F. M. Dastaevskii, PoirlOe sobral1ie sochil1el1ii: Kal1ol1icheskie teksty (Petrozavadsk: Izdva PetrGU, 1995- present). Caral Apallania, ed., The New Russian Dostoevsky: Readings far the Twenty-First Century, Blaomington, IN: Siavica Publishers, 2010, 43- 46. 44 VLADIMIR ZAKHAROV 111is unpublished letter, dated 14/26 March 1877, is addressed to Semyon Nikolaevich Tsvet. His name is absent in the extensive indexes to Dostoevsky's works and letters, to reference works, and to memoirs about the author and about his contemporaries. In the 1956 "Description of the Manuscripts of F. M. Dostoevsky," Tsvet is treated not as a name, but as a common noun, a physical phenomenon. The incorrect description reads almost like a joke: "Envelope from a letter from an undetermined person. On the front side of the envelope is a note by Dostoevsky that reads'About the Navy and color [tsvete].",2 The correct description reads (in its entirety): "Tsvet about the Navy. Note on the envelope of a letter to Dostoevsky from an undetermined person. Postmark: 21 March 1877.,,3 This and other letters by Tsvet have disappeared. The envelope from the missing letter and an article by Tsvet about the Russian Navy are preserved in the Pushkin House archives. In his day, S. N. Tsvet (1829-1900) was a major govemment official; he served in the Finance Ministry, representing the Treasury first in Grodno, and later in Tavricheskaia Province. His govemment service in the Russian provinces did not interfere with an active social and intellectual life: he authored articles on political and literary subjects, wrote a brochure, "Toward a History of Russian Nihilism," about Turgenev's novel Fathers and Children, and corresponded with writers and joumalists. [...] Tsvet was one of many worthy, but now forgotten names in Russian history. In our day S. N. Tsvet is remembered only as the father of Mikhail Semyonovich Tsvet, a famous Russian physiologist and botanist, who was bom 14 May 1872 in Asti (Italy), and died in Voronezh on 26 June 1919 of starvation and disease during the Civil War. In 1901, at the Eleventh Congress of Naturalists and Physicians in St. Petersburg he announced the discovery of the chromatography method, which served as the basis for many advances in science and technology in the twentieth century. [...] In 1918 M. S. Tsvet was nominated for a Nobel Prize, though in vain; the prize that year was awarded to the man who invented chemical weapons, Fritz Haber, for synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and...