did Dostoevsky meet Dickens?

[naiman at BERKELEY.EDU]

Cassio de Oliveira, in Moscow, has just visited the Russian State Library
and reports on "what [he] was (not) able to find"

The Russian State Library lists no such journal as "Vedomosti Akademii Nauk
Kazakhskoi SSR." The closest reference I could find was to the *Vestnik *AN
Kazakhskoi SSR. The card record for the Vestnik contains a handwritten note
that says that issues starting in 1985 are in Kazakh.

Additionally, the library contains a number of different Izvestiia for the
various institutes or series within the AN Kazakhskoi SSR, but none of them
matches the "Institut istorii, filologii i filosofii." There is (or there
used to be) one such "Institut istorii, filosofii i filologii," but it is
(was) located in Novosibirsk, and the periodicals listed under the card
catalog for that heading date from the 1990s.

Disclaimer: not being yet entirely familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the
card catalog, I may have missed something. Yet, it seems fairly certain that
there is no publication in the RSL holdings under the headings of "Akademii
Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR," "Vedomosti," or "Institut istorii, filologii i
filosofii" that would match the source you provided.

I've asked Cassio to request the Vestnik, and we will see what he
discovers.  Meanwhile, Robert Bird has found a record of a similar Vestnik
in the holdings of the University of Illinois.


I’ve been reflecting on this episode.  The story of Dostoevsky’s meeting
with Dickens was able to survive for a decade because it started small, as
something of a scholarly “sleeper cell.”  The name Dostoevsky does not
surface in the title of Stephanie Harvey’s brief (three page) article in
the Dickensian, and though the quotation from Dostoevsky accounts for
about a fifth of the text, it isn’t pitched as the author’s discovery:  
“The relevant passage of this letter – translated here for the first time
into English – is as follows.”  To be sure, I doubt that the article could
have been published without it; otherwise the argument would have been
just – “as many writers have said, Dickens drew on his own internal
demons.”  But this modesty allowed the publication to escape the immediate
attention of readers interested in Dostoevsky, and it also permitted later
scholars of Dickens to come along and think “OMG, she didn’t know what she
had.”  Even they, though, appear to have treated this meeting gingerly –- 
or perhaps not, I hope we will hear from Prof. Hollington – and it took
the book reviewer of the NY Times, writing from a position of
institutional authority and apparent expertise, to detonate this scholarly
bomb, on one hand leading people in the academy to discredit it, but on
the other winning circulation far exceeding the reach of academic
publications and achieving immortality on the web.

Of course, it may still be true.   (How great would that be!)  A Kazakh
publication to this effect might surface.  I’m sure even scientists look
wistfully at the surface of the water when visiting Loch Ness.   In any
case, teachers of Dostoevsky will be reading about it for years.  And even
at conferences, many of you reading this are likely to witness moments
when a speaker, after the delivery of an interesting paper, will be called
over to the corner and told in a whisper – “That was really good, Mr.
Smith, but you know…..”

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