did Dostoevsky meet Dickens?

[Lewis B. Sckolnick]

Under the Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences  there was a history division 
being:

Valikhavnov Institute of History, Archeology, and Ethnography of the 
Kazakhstan Academy of Sciences
UL Shevchenko 28, Almaty 480021 KZ
(This location is in the center of the city)
Tel 69 67 19
All of the branches of the Academy of Sciences were originally branches 
of the Moscow office with Novosibirsk long having been the Siberian one.

My source is M.E. Sharpe
A Scholars Guide...
1993



> 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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-- 
Lewis B. Sckolnick
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