did dostoevsky meet dickens?

[naiman at BERKELEY.EDU]

Some of you probably saw Michiko Kakutani's review of two new books on
Dickens in the NY Times the other day.  It opens with Dostoevsky's account
of his meeting with Dickens in London in 1862:

In a remarkable account of a meeting he had with Charles Dickens in 1862,
Dostoyevsky recalled that the British novelist told him: “All the good
simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like
Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what
he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of
causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for
comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in
what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as
he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels
the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man
ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/books/charles-dickens-by-claire-tomalin-becoming-dickens.html?_r=1&ref=books

I hadn't heard of this encounter, and a few moments of googling took me to
Michael Slater's 2009 Yale UP's biography of Dickens.  Slater's source is
a 2002 article published in The Dickensian, by Stephanie Harvey, which
relies on a 1987 publication "Dva pis'ma [Dostoevskogo] 1878" in vol.45 of
Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR: Institut Istorii, Filologii i
Filosofii.  The publication is by K. K. Shayakhmetov.  Since 2002, this
encounter between Dostoevsky and Dickens has been wending its way through
Dickens scholarship and has now gone big time.  Sarah J. Young, in her
series "Russian in London", casts doubt upon its authenticity and asks
whether the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, etc. even
exists.  She points out that the 30 vol Collected Letters, published after
1987, does not contain these articles, and neither does the Letopis' of
Dostoevsky's Day-by-Day -- published in the mid 90s -- have any mention of
the encounter.  Dr. Young concludes: One can only conclude therefore that
the letter isn’t genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the two
men meeting is so wonderful

http://sarahjyoung.com/site/2010/12/19/russians-in-london-dostoevsky/

Indeed, the final sentence of the letter appears to have been written by a
Dostoevsky who has read Bakhtin.  (Or it is proof that Bakhtin was
"right.")  In any event, I would appreciate any light being shed on this
by those more knowledgeable about FMD than I.  Has anyone seen this
journal or the letters?  Was there any discussion of them in Russia?  I've
requested the journal through interlibrary loan, but I wonder if any
readers of this list currently in Russia or Kazakhstan might take an hour
or so to find this issue and report back to the list, perhaps with a scan?
 There seems to be an interesting story here about the workings of
scholarship, one way or the other.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Use your web browser to search the archives, control your subscription
  options, and more.  Visit and bookmark the SEELANGS Web Interface at:
                    http://seelangs.home.comcast.net/
-------------------------------------------------------------------------