“The Priest and the Devil” — a Story that Dostoevsky Never Wrote

The article presents a critical analysis of a literary hoax — a text allegedly belonging to F. M. Dostoevsky with more than a century-long distribution history in the form of numerous translations in Japanese and Chinese. “The Priest and the Devil,” attributed to the Russian writer, has never existed in the Russian language. It was created in English by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Its spread in China was facilitated primarily by the mistaken identification of the story with the chapter “At Tikhon’s” from the novel “Demons” due to the similarity of their titles when translated into Chinese. In this language, the singular and plural have no morphological markers, and the same hieroglyphs (without an additional lexeme expressing the parameter of plurality) can refer to either one demon/devil or a group of demons. However, the text of “The Priest and the Devil” does not correspond to Dostoevsky’s artistic style either ideologically, or in terms of literary techniques, or stylistically, and the dialogue between the antagonistic characters is an outright falsification of the ideological confrontation between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor from “The Brothers Karamazov” or Elder Tikhon and Nikolai Stavrogin from the novel “Demons”.