
When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (2013) - lermontov
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/when-dickens-met-dostoevsky/
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CalChris
I read this back when it came out. It's an awesome detective story. The
central question is why would someone perpetrate such a minor fraud. It is
like art forgery but you can't sell it.

You have to get into the fraudster's head, which the article does to a degree.
The resulting answer isn't rational in the sense that you would agree with.
The fraudster doesn't get anything but rather damages something. You come to
an empirical understanding, according to the facts presented, of a minor
mediocrity passed over by life and striking back.

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dang
There's also [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/10/man-behind-
dic...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/10/man-behind-dickens-
dostoevsky-hoax).

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B1FF_PSUVM
> “that the letter isn’t genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the
> two men meeting is so wonderful.”

I may be biased, but to me Dickens looks like a bit of a hack publishing
serials in newspapers, and Dostoevsky one of those serious writers dropping
deep books once in a while.

~~~
dang
Dostoevsky did publish in serials! This is related to a story. Before he
finished _Crime and Punishment_ , which was being serialized, he had to write
a whole other novel in order to prevent an unscrupulous publisher from
capturing the rights to all his future work. In the end he was saved by
dictating _The Gambler_ to a young woman named Anna Snitkina who was the star
pupil at the local shorthand academy (shorthand was an innovation at the
time). During the day, he would work on finishing _Crime and Punishment_ while
she worked on transcribing _The Gambler_. Then in the evenings, he would
dictate the next part of _The Gambler_ and she would get it in shorthand. They
would talk about the characters too.

They finished on the last possible day. The publisher cunningly closed his
office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, but
Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt.
Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.

It's fitting that this high-stakes drama produced _The Gambler_ (a great short
book btw), since Dostoevsky had gotten into it in the first place because of
his gambling addiction. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life
stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting though.

Joseph Frank's biography is the best English source but he spends too many
pages on this for a Google Books link to be useful. This one works though:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=do...](https://books.google.com/books?id=1C1K-BnFGFIC&pg=PA51&dq=dostoevsky+anna+shorthand&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjl3a_v_oDlAhXIs54KHUT1DY4Q6AEwAnoECAIQAg#v=onepage&q=dostoevsky%20anna%20shorthand&f=false)

Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel
were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens
included. How on earth did they do it? But no doubt the non-masterpieces were
less coherent.

~~~
CalChris
Even _Don Quixote_ was published in two parts, separated by a decade. In fact,
there was so much clamoring for a sequel that someone else wrote a sequel and
then Cervantes spends a bit of time (Chapter 59) in part two dealing with the
author, Avellaneda.

BTW, if you like Russian literature, I recommend _Possessed_ by Elif Batuman.
It is her reading of Russian lit and a recounting of her travels in Russia and
Turkey during graduate school at Stanford.

