did Dostoevsky meet Dickens? Update

[Rebecca Jane Stanton]

And yet, remarkably, a second review of the same two Dickens 
biographies, written by David Gates and published yesterday in the NY 
Times, cites the same Dickens-Dostoevsky meeting on the same evidence, 
with no caveat or correction appended:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/books/review/charles-dickens-biographies-review.html?pagewanted=all

Concerning Dostoevsky's purported account of the meeting, Gates writes: 
"As Tomalin notes, this 'must be Dickens's most profound statement about 
his inner life,' and it seems to be one of the few crucial bits of 
Dickensiana that’s relatively fresh. Both Tomalin and Michael Slater, 
who cites the same passage in his 2009 biography, 'Charles Dickens,' 
found the newly translated Dostoyevsky letter in a 2002 article in The 
Dickensian. Neither Fred Kaplan ('Dickens: A Biography,' 1988) nor Peter 
Ackroyd ('Dickens,' 1991) seems to have known about it."

All the best,
Rebecca Stanton

On 11/3/2011 5:42 PM, naiman at BERKELEY.EDU wrote:
> The NY Times has posted a corrections to the Kakutani review:
>
> The Books of The Times review on Tuesday, about “Becoming Dickens: The
> Invention of a Novelist” by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and “Charles
> Dickens” by Claire Tomalin, recounted an anecdote in Ms. Tomalin’s book in
> which Dostoyevsky told of meeting Dickens. While others have also written
> of such a meeting and of a letter in which Dostoyevsky was said to have
> described it, some scholars have questioned the authenticity of the letter
> and whether the meeting ever occurred.

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