Abstract

This article reconsiders the vexed question of the authorship of the anonymous review (published in the journal Vremia, 1861) of the book Poems by A.S. Khomyakov. The review dealt not only with Khomyakov’s poems but also with his oeuvre as a whole, including his theological works. Inductive logic was applied to the task of resolving the text’s attribution, as a comparison of the respective likelihoods (conditional probabilities) of two alternative hypotheses: authorship by either Apollon Grigoriev or Fedor Dostoevsky. The author of the review speaks about Khomyakov’s theological brochures and tragedy Ermak with the same opinions and even almost the same wording as Grigoriev does in other texts of the same period. No similar opinions appear in texts belonging to Dostoevsky, even though Dostoevsky’s interest in Khomyakov’s journalism (but not his theology) is documented from the early 1860s. There are no grounds for speaking of any theological influence by Khomyakov on Dostoevsky in the 1860s (unlike in Dostoevsky’s last years). The conclusion by Boris F. Egorov that the author was Grigoriev is confirmed, whereas Vladimir N. Zakharov’s arguments for the authorship of Dostoevsky are disproved.

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