“Embroidery on Someone Else’s Canvas”: Dostoevsky as Co-Author of the “Answer to a Protest”

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the question on the authorship of the “Answer to a Protest” which is adjacent to the cycle of essays by V.P. Meshchersky “Letters of a Freethinker” in the weekly journal “Grazhdanin” (“The Citizen”). The attributions of the “Answer to a Protest” undertaken by V.A. Viktorovich (Dostoevsky’s authorship hypothesis) and B.V. Fedorenko (Meshchersky’s authorship hypothesis) are compared and critically examined. The documentary sources for the attribution of the article are analyzed: the fee list of the journal “Grazhdanin”, Meshchersky’s letter to Dostoevsky dated August 19, 1873, Dostoevsky’s testimony in the published note to the “Answer to a Protest”, etc. In the text of the “Answer to a Protest” lexical units and syntactic constructions are typical for both Meshchersky’s and Dostoevsky’s publications, and equally inherent in the texts of both possible authors. The analysis of the content and style of the article (with the involvement of documentary sources) allows us to consider it as the result of a co-authorship between Dostoevsky and Meshchersky, arising from edits and additions made by the editor of the journal “Grazhdanin” on the original author’s manuscript.

Keywords

• “grazhdanin” (“the citizen”)
• v.p. meshchersky
• “answer to a protest”
• editing
• co-authorship
• attribution
• fee list
• stylistic analysis