did Dostoevsky meet Dickens? Update

[naiman at BERKELEY.EDU]

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.

The website of the Dickensian now contains a similar note of caution.

Cassio de Oliveira has determined that no journal with the title Vedomosti
Akademii Nauk Kasakhskoi SSR exists in the Leninka.  Nor is there a trace
of it on the website <http://cat.nlrk.kz/> of the National Library of the
Republic of Kazakhstan.  Neither library holds anything by K.
Shaiakhmetov, the purported publisher of the letter detailing the Dickens
Dostoevsky encounter.  Cassio did consult the Kazakh Academy of Science
Vestnik for the year in question and found no article on Dostoevsky.  (The
vestnik is not numbered by volume, but 1987 would be volume 44; the issue
of Vedomosti  was supposed to have been no.45).

The issue of the Dickensian which published Stephanie Harvey's partial
translation of the letter did not contain any information about her in
Notes on Contributors.  She was the only unidentified contributor in the
volume.  According to the current editor, who was the editor then as well,
she later sent in information saying that she was a freelance writer.  I
have been able to find no other publications by a Stephanie Harvey about
Dickens or Victorian literature.  In a moment of cynicism it occurred to
me that Stephanie Harvey might be the Julius Hanford of Dickens
scholarship.  The name, when run through an anagram program, produces no
interesting results.  The editor of the Dickensian never met her and was
informed of her serious accident by an email from her sister.  It is not
unusual for the Dickensian to publish articles by scholars without
academic affiliation.  The serious reported state of Ms. Harvey's health
makes me reluctant to pursue this angle further.

Maybe something new will surface at some point.  For now, thanks to
Cassio, especially, and to all others who contributed to this collective
effort.

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