“A Word About the Great Artist” by Fyodor Dostoevsky: the Beginning of the Literary Path of Lawyer Anatoly Koni

Abstract

Anatoly Koni was not only a judicial, state, public and scientific figure, a teacher, but also a writer who left his memoirs of figures of Russian culture and deserved the recognition of his contemporaries. They nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature, elected him a member of the jury of the Pushkin Prize in Literature, an honorary academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in the category of fine literature, an honorary member of the Pushkin Lyceum Society and a freelance employee of the Pushkin House. The article pays special attention to the beginning of the literary activity of lawyer Anatoly Koni. The reason this talented judicial speaker tried his hand at writing was the sudden death of Fyodor Dostoevsky. These two outstanding contemporaries were linked by a friendship that lasted from 1873 until the writer’s death. They met at court sessions at the trials of Vera Zasulich and Ekaterina Kornilova, made a joint trip to the colony of juvenile lawbreakers, and in the late 1870s lived nearby and had the opportunity to visit each other. The lawyer’s literary career began in 1881, with a speech about Dostoevsky as a criminologist, which later became a repeatedly reprinted essay. The article examines the autograph of the speech, preserved thanks to the writer’s widow Anna Dostoevskaya, and reveals the main features of Kony’s artistic skill, reflected in his subsequent creative works: the influence of his legal profession on literary work, his preference for an impassioned style and didactic pathos, the use of figurative means of expression, and biblical allusions. Koni constantly reworked, supplemented and repeatedly republished his memoirs about Dostoevsky, but they were generally structured into three original essays included in his collected works: “Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky,” “F. M. Dostoevsky,” “More About Dostoevsky.” These texts analyze the work of the author of “Crime and Punishment” from a legal professional’s point of view, and also note the characteristic features of the writer and the person — “a model and a great teacher.” It was in the essay on Dostoevsky that Kony’s talent of an inspired writer was discovered, but Anatoly Fedorovich himself also played an important role in Dostoevsky’s life and work, honestly revealing to the writer the contradictory features of the Russian justice system and being an example of an excellent lawyer. The study uses a wide range of archival and memoir sources: the autograph of the speech of Anatoly Koni about Dostoevsky, his memoirs, the lawyer’s correspondence with members of the Dostoevsky family, notebooks and memoirs of Anna Dostoevskaya.