The article offers a philological reading of Gogol’s “A Bewitched Place.” The aim of the proposed approach is to examine features of its artistic structure that remain understudied in Gogol scholarship and require special consideration. Hence the attention to the title of the story, which derives from the name of the locus — both plotwise and semantically tied to Dikanka as the primary setting. The text of the story is marked by its spatial quality, “Dikansky,” where the key event that determines its specificity is the clash of a human with the demonic sphere. The author interprets the title as a self-designation of Gogol’s spatial text, centered on the paradigm of the bewitched place. This semiotically charged spatial point functions as an opening into an unreal world inhabited by evil spirits, from which demonic influences that have captured the hero emanate. They lead to his temporary corruption, as he succumbs to the temptation of quick enrichment. The “devilish force,” as the narrator calls it, lures and seduces the hero, aiming not to destroy but to fool and mock him. It manipulates his perception, through optical and acoustic illusions, and appears to succeed. However, because of this trial, the hero discovers a readiness and determination to resist devil temptations in the future, should he encounter them again. This underscores the story’s significance as the concluding piece of the cycle, casting a retrospective light on the preceding tales.

The article publishes a previously unknown letter to Joseph Stalin in defense of Dostoevsky’s legacy, written in 1948. Until now, this document was preserved in the archival collection of the prominent Dostoevsky scholar A.S. Dolinin in the Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library as a letter by an unknown author. The present article not only identifies the author’s name but also introduces a previously unknown figure into the history of Dostoevsky studies, whose biography the author attempts to reconstruct. This figure is Elena Ivanovna Nesterova (1916–?), born into an Old Believer family, who graduated from a teachers’ institute and worked as a librarian at the Udmurt Republican Pushkin Library in the 1940s. Living and working in Izhevsk, Nesterova dreamed of becoming a scholar of Dostoevsky’s works and continuing her philological education in graduate school. In 1946, she wrote an essay on Dostoevsky’s humanism for this purpose, which was sent to Leningrad University and came into the hands of Professor A.S. Dolinin. The correspondence that ensued between them reveals not only Dolinin’s compassionate, generous, and truly pedagogical character but also paints a portrait of Nesterova, who, though shaped by Soviet upbringing, had been deeply influenced by Dostoevsky’s works from a young age. Moreover, she managed to gather around her a circle of literary enthusiasts who shared her views. When the campaign against Dostoevsky erupted in December 1947, Nesterova found the courage to stand up in defense of her beloved writer by writing a letter to Joseph Stalin.

The material is devoted to the 27th International Readings Dostoevsky’s Works in the Perception of 21st-Century Readers, held on April 8–10, 2025 in the city of Staraya Russa, Novgorod region. The conference was traditionally organized by the Novgorod Museum-Reserve, the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Commission for the Study of Dostoevsky’s Creative Heritage of the Scientific Council History of World Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was attended by more than 50 researchers from Russia and the USA. The focal text for most presentations, the roundtable discussion, and the seminar was the sentimental novel White Nights.

The article examines the presence of Fyodor Dostoevsky in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov. The points of intersection of the artistic world of the author of Lolita with Dostoevsky’s works are identified; the peculiarities of the reception of Crime and Punishment in the novels The Defense of Luzhin, Invitation to Execution, Despair are explored. The attitude of Vladimir Nabokov to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky is ambiguous and requires careful and deep analysis. At the same time, one should rely not on the writer’s loud statements, given his love of hoaxes and penchant for shocking, but on his artistic creativity, in which one can catch echoes of his true attitude. In The Defense of Luzhin Nabokov’s artistic world “intersects” with the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky on three levels at least (the themes of the game, psychiatry as a source of poetics, and images of heroes). The novel can be considered polemical and parodic, but still “pro-Dostoevsky.” If we turn to the origins of the parody and consider that initially everything that was most sacred was parodied, then we can assume that the intertext is a manifestation of Nabokov’s hidden sympathy to the poetics of F.M. Dostoevsky. The novel Invitation to Execution, which is full of references to Dostoevsky, most clearly, according to researchers, illustrates the method of fantastic realism, the origins of which should be found in Dostoevsky, and the theme of crime and punishment in it is, as it were, inverted. “A grin from Dostoevsky” also appears in the novel Lolita. Parody mimicking, playing “in Dostoevsky” turn Lolita into a travesty-inverted Crime and Punishment. In the novel Despair Nabokov contrasts the gloomy thinker and “neurasthenic” Raskolnikov with the false thinker and “neurotic scoundrel” German Karlovich, who can be called a parodic-reduced transformation of Raskolnikov, his “vile mimicry.” Other characters in Crime and Punishment also undergo transformation. It is obvious that, despite the declared rejection, Nabokov was still captivated by the creative influence of his famous predecessor. The writer develops an extensive polemic with the classic in his work. The figure of Dostoevsky, images, themes and motifs of his works are manifested in different ways in Nabokov’s works: as characters, as parodies, as a riddle or a game with the reader.

The article examines the Battle of Berezina in the Patriotic War of 1812 as one of the significant historical and literary dreams of the Dreamer’s story in Dostoevsky’s early sentimental novel White Nights. The list of dreams of the hero of White Nights — which includes, in addition to the Battle of Berezina, St. Bartholomew’s Night, a heroic role in the capture of Kazan by Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, the burning of Jan Hus in Constance, Danton, Cleopatra and her lovers, a house in Kolomna, etc. — was added by Dostoevsky to the text of the novel during its revision in 1860. It is argued that this list cannot be reduced to the writer’s autobiography and identified with the similar list from the feuilleton Petersburg Dreams in Verse and Prose (1861), nor it is correct to strictly divide it into purely literary and historical elements. It is proved that Dostoevsky’s hero looks at world history as an artist and poet, mainly through the prism of art, and his interest in tragic and bloody events, executions and murders, is due not to pathological cruelty, but to the desire to transform these perversions of the human spirit into stories of human compassion and empathetic participation. Special attention is paid to possible sources of the hero’s dreams about the Battle of Berezina: Honoré de Balzac’s short story Farewell! (1830), the historical novel by R.M. Zotov Borodino core and Berezinskaya ferry (1844), etc. In addition, an attempt is made to describe the hidden Napoleonism of the Dreamer, who, like Dostoevsky, was born in the year of Napoleon’s death.

The theatrical and cinematic fate of the novel Demons is largely determined by the historical context in which the work on a particular play or film about it was carried out. This article examines the key events in the novel’s non-literary life, as well as presents the critical reception of contemporaries who often engage in polemics. Among other things, it attempts to understand what makes a theatrical or cinematic adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel artistically successful or not. Starting with the first theatrical production of Demons in 1907, the review ends with the performance of the St. Petersburg theatre “Masterskaya” staged in the bicentenary of the writer’s birth. The interest of directors in Dostoevsky’s novel increased in the decisive historical periods. One of the most successful productions of Demons in the 1990s was Lev Dodin’s play at the Theatre of Europe (MDT). Demons has also been successful in new forms of theatre, such as immersive theatre. The review also includes the foreign creative reception of the novel. Demons is of interest both to the directors of the French “new wave,” who use Dostoevsky’s novel in their sharply political works, and to authors such as the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, who try to understand their own national identity through the prism of Russian literature. It is also possible to identify two directorial approaches to the novel: some authors try to divide the Demons into separate components (conditionally “romantic” and “political”), while others try to embrace Dostoevsky’s text in its entirety.

The article is an attempt to reconstruct the context of Dostoevsky’s child’s readings, the ideological centers of which were the works by Pushkin and Walter Scott. The starting point in the study is ego-documents: the “Memoirs” of A.M. Dostoevsky, the writer’s younger brother, and Dostoevsky’s autobiographical statements in journal articles and letters. An analysis of Pushkin’s publishing activities and translation practice in Russia in the first third of the 19th century, when Russian readers got acquainted with the novels of Walter Scott, suggests that Dostoevsky could have read in his early years and how. The main sources of his acquaintancewith Pushkin’s work in his parents’ house were the lifetime publications of the poet’s works in the “Library for Reading” by O.I. Senkovsky and individual editions of prose (primarily The Belkin’s Tales, 1831), and after admission to the Main Engineering College in St. Petersburg a posthumous Collection of works by A.S. Pushkin in 11 volumes (1838–1841). The poetic “duel” of the Dostoevsky brothers, in which Fyodor Mikhailovich recited “The Song of Prophetic Oleg,” suggests that Dostoevsky already in his early years preferred Pushkin’s works of historical and national themes, which bore fruit in the mature work of Dostoevsky, who comprehended Pushkin’s place on a “universal” scale. “The Whole Walter Scott,” which Dostoevsky read at the age of 12, was presented in the 1830s with Russian translations mainly from French. Despite the “heavy and ancient translation” the young Dostoevsky repeatedly reread the novels Quentin Durward and Waverley, which indicates his early interest in the problems of moral formation of personality, issues of honor and conscience. The “sense of family” as a distinctive feature of the works of Walter Scott in Dostoevsky’s work receives a fundamental justification and expands to the concept of a unifying idea connecting family and society. For Dostoevsky, the “high educational significance” of Walter Scott is not speculative, but purely personal in nature: he correlated his own actions with what he read in childhood, and Walter Scott acted as a moral guide here. The “all-responsiveness” that Dostoevsky found in Pushkin was unique to him as well, originating from the impressions formed during his childhood reading.

As a direct continuation of the literary line established by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, The Idiot presents itself as a ruthless challenge to the subjectively contemplated idealistic space, in which the writer maintains strict consistency within the framework of realism (inspired by Gogol’s reality and Belinky’s influence), while trying to find a gap capable of opening the shrinking “narrowness” of the nihilistic realm of horror. In this article, we will focus on the definition and comprehension of the proposed reality, adhering to its limits to reveal the author’s creative intent in the novel. Moreover, based on the central theme of the “moment,” we will turn to a consideration of the paideia in the context of Plato’s myth of the cave (as the “fourth step,” implying a return to the cave after contemplation of the withdrawn Sun). The parallels with the philosophical views of Plato and other authors (Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc.) will be necessary to consistently explore the tragedy of “the deepest and most fatal mystery of man,” who perishes under the onslaught of the contradictions of existence (in the face of horror) and loses the sacramental word at the fatal moment. The key aim of the article is to comprehend the mystical component of the novel’s final scene from a philosophical perspective. In particular, using the central symbol of The Dead Christ in the Tomb by Holbein as a visual illustration of the novel’s religious-mystical and philosophical idea, its, we will structure our analysis of the final events to adequately reflect the necessity of the author’s introduction of the “ghost in the hall.” In the section “Instead of a Conclusion,” the author attempts to detail the significance of this, which precedes the protagonist’s transformation.

The article is dedicated to the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky, whom his contemporaries called a speculator who profited from people of art. Starting as a music publisher and music seller, Stellovsky took up the “Complete Works of Russian Authors” (L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, A.F. Pisemsky, V.V. Krestovsky, etc.). He conducted several litigations (with the sister of the composer M.I. Glinka L.I. Shestakova, with A.S. Dargomyzhsky, with publishers A.S. Hieroglyphov, M.O. Wolf, N.M. Bernard, and finally with the writer F.M. Dostoevsky). Dostoevsky’s correspondence with Stellovsky has not been preserved: there is information about one letter from Dostoevsky to his publisher. The history of the relationship between Dostoevsky and Stellovsky is considered on the basis of the writer’s correspondence with others in the period from 1865 to 1875 (the year of the publisher’s death). Since 1869, Dostoevsky was in the process of pre-trial and later trial with Stellovsky, who in 1870 published Crime and Punishment as the 4th volume of the writer’s collected works, but did not want to pay the money owed to him. Dostoevsky began a litigation that dragged on for almost five years, because of the obstacles that the bailiffs and guardians of the publisher put up. Stellovsky himself had gone bankrupt in the book trade, went crazy and could no longer answer the claim. Using the example of the trials against Stellovsky, the article shows that the understanding of copyright in the Russian Empire differed from the modern one and, due to its lack of elaboration, was interpreted differently in judicial practice, which led to delays and contributed to the activities of scammers such as Stellovsky.