Not for General Consumption: Anna Dostoevskaya Creates a Better, Kinder Fyodor Dostoevsky

• In Event: 19th-Century Russophone Women Writers I: In Dialogue with Famous Men

Abstract

In the early 1890s, after more than ten years of widowhood, Anna Dostoevskaya began deciphering her 1867 shorthand diary and editing it in the process, likely preparing to make it public. The bulk of editorial changes involved Dostoevsky’s presentation in her daily reports on their life abroad. Many of these changes had to do with his political and religious views, but even more edits concerned his everyday behavior. These edits removed or altered Anna’s original reports of their frequent quarrels, most often initiated by Dostoevsky. The paper will examine some of these changes to ascertain the way Anna’s negotiated the shift between private and public and, simultaneously, to observe the emergence of Anna’s new identity as a widow of a great writer as compared to her earlier self-presentation in her hermetic diary.

Author

• Irina Reyfman, Columbia U