did dostoevsky meet dickens?

[Jane Costlow]

  My colleague in English, Lillian Nayder, has just published a critical 
biography of Dickens' wife, so I asked her opinion on this.  Here's her 
answer:

>
> Thanks for the interesting material on Dickens and Dostoevsky.  I 
> don't believe that they met--and Michael apparently caught some grief 
> for including that claim in his biography.  I have the paperback 
> edition, and he has added a preface to it that reads:
>
> "Since the letter purportedly written by Dostoevsky in 1862 describing 
> an interview with Dickens which appeared on p. 502 of the first 
> edition cannot be satisfactorily authenticated I have removed it from 
> this edition."
>
> It's too bad that these stories keep getting recirculated. 


On 10/26/11 4:37 PM, naiman at BERKELEY.EDU wrote:
> 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.
>
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