The Wedding in Simferopol (F. F. Dostoevsky and E. P. Tsugalovskaya)

Crimea played an important role in the fates of F. M. Dostoevsky’s closest relatives. For almost two years (July 1858 — May 1860), the writer’s brother Andrei Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was on duty on the peninsula (Simferopol, Feodosia, Yalta, Sevastopol, Balaklava). The novelist’s widow, Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya, who died in 1918 in German-occupied Yalta (Hotel “France”) the owner of the dacha on the South Coast. An important milestone in the life of the son of the classic writer Fyodor Fyodorovich Dostoevsky is connected with Simferopol: not only did he realize his dream of his own stud farm, but also got married for the second time. At the first glance, the “Crimean pages” in the biography of Fyodor Fyodorovich Dostoevsky have been thoroughly studied. However, the “Simferopol chronicle” of his life requires revision and clarification. This article proposes corrections to the date and place of the wedding of F. F. Dostoevsky and E. P. Tsugalovskaya. Irrefutable documentary evidence of this event is provided by the corresponding entry in the register of births, marriages and deaths of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Simferopol, which is currently preserved in the State Archives of the Republic of Crimea. An important verification commentary to this entry was the “Simferopol letters” of F. F. Dostoevsky to his mother. The surviving March and May messages of 1903 not only confirmed the wedding date indicated in the metric (April 27, 1903), but also helped to establish an nontrivial place of the sacrament — the house church in the name of St. Andrew the First-Called at the Orphanage of Andrei Yakovlevich Fabre. The juxtaposition of data from the metric record and direct epistolary evidence of F. F. Dostoevsky also made it possible to determine the members of his immediate circle in Simferopol.