Dostoevsky: Reminiscences

“The story of Dostoevsky’s extraordinary second marriage during which he wrote his greatest novels is a novel in itself . . . It is a plain, straightforward, honest, and moving account of a happy if reckless marriage . . . The brave, simple young adorer has written the only really intimate portrait of him that we have.” —V. S. Pritchett, New York Review of Books The present translation of the Reminiscences is based on the second Russian edition, published in Moscow in 1971 and edited by the Dostoevsky scholars S. V. Belov and V. A. Tunimanov. They have carried Grossman’s work further by rearranging the manuscript into twelve broad chapters in chronological sequence, corresponding to the most important periods in the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s family. This necessitated some transposition of material to where it chronologically belonged, as well as the elimination of certain redundant episodes left in the Grossman edition. Belov and Tunimanov also added, as a first chapter, Anna Grigoryevna’s description of her childhood and youth and the milieu in which her extraordinary character was formed. In the book’s last chapter, “After Dostoevsky’s Death,” they retained Anna Grigoryevna’s “Answer to Strakhov” and added to it her description of her only meeting with Leo Tolstoy, not included in the Grossman edition. To this chapter the translator of the present edition has also restored the brief section “Memoirists,” omitted from the second Russian edition.