Pushkin and Walter Scott in the Context of Dostoevsky’s Child’s Readings

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the context of Dostoevsky’s child’s readings, the ideological centers of which were the works by Pushkin and Walter Scott. The starting point in the study is ego-documents: the “Memoirs” of A.M. Dostoevsky, the writer’s younger brother, and Dostoevsky’s autobiographical statements in journal articles and letters. An analysis of Pushkin’s publishing activities and translation practice in Russia in the first third of the 19th century, when Russian readers got acquainted with the novels of Walter Scott, suggests that Dostoevsky could have read in his early years and how. The main sources of his acquaintancewith Pushkin’s work in his parents’ house were the lifetime publications of the poet’s works in the “Library for Reading” by O.I. Senkovsky and individual editions of prose (primarily The Belkin’s Tales, 1831), and after admission to the Main Engineering College in St. Petersburg a posthumous Collection of works by A.S. Pushkin in 11 volumes (1838–1841). The poetic “duel” of the Dostoevsky brothers, in which Fyodor Mikhailovich recited “The Song of Prophetic Oleg,” suggests that Dostoevsky already in his early years preferred Pushkin’s works of historical and national themes, which bore fruit in the mature work of Dostoevsky, who comprehended Pushkin’s place on a “universal” scale. “The Whole Walter Scott,” which Dostoevsky read at the age of 12, was presented in the 1830s with Russian translations mainly from French. Despite the “heavy and ancient translation” the young Dostoevsky repeatedly reread the novels Quentin Durward and Waverley, which indicates his early interest in the problems of moral formation of personality, issues of honor and conscience. The “sense of family” as a distinctive feature of the works of Walter Scott in Dostoevsky’s work receives a fundamental justification and expands to the concept of a unifying idea connecting family and society. For Dostoevsky, the “high educational significance” of Walter Scott is not speculative, but purely personal in nature: he correlated his own actions with what he read in childhood, and Walter Scott acted as a moral guide here. The “all-responsiveness” that Dostoevsky found in Pushkin was unique to him as well, originating from the impressions formed during his childhood reading.