And the hidden became the evident: Sergey Fedorovich Kalugin, correspondent of F. M. Dostoevsky

The article is among the historiographic works researching into the topic of the ambience of F. M. Dostoevsky. The research focuses on the figure of an actor, writer, and professional newsman, author of “The Citizen” and correspondent of Dostoevsky. The image of S. F. Kalugin undergoes transformations in the article: an unlucky literary day worker bowed down with poverty, a swindler using unworthy ways of making money, a successful actor, writer and newsman having overcome misfortunes and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Due to the graphological and authorship examination of the letter of Kalugin's “son”, held on the basis of the achievements of domestic forensic science, it is highly likely to allow reattributing this letter to S. F. Kalugin himself; the appeal to the archives in Moscow and St. Petersburg made it possible to significantly enrich a biographic portrait of the character, and to add bare facts to the hypothesis and eventual conclusions.