Dostoevsky in Florence

Abstract

mazov. Yet there is hardly any account of his life in Florence except for a few paragraphs in his correspondence and in his wife's reminiscences. Anna mentioned that they lived near the Pitti, but not even the Florentines knew exactly where. Recently the Soviet poet Yevtushenko tried in vain to locate the apartment. The clue lay in Florence, and it led to a new and vivid picture of the painful isolation in which he worked abroad. This was all the more marked because of the extraordinary brilliance of the five short years (1865-1870) when Florence was the capital of the new Italy. Six years earlier, in 1862, Dostoevsky first visited the city with his friend, the critic N. N. Strakhov. The latter says in his reminiscences that they visited the Vieusseux library, where they found Russian periodicals, not easily found elsewhere in Italy. This famous institution was the intellectual cradle of the Risorgimento, and today it is housed in the magnificent Strozzi Palace on Via Tornabuoni. One day not long ago I stopped in to see what materials they might have on Dostoevsky. To my amazement the attendant told me they had Dostoevsky's autographs.