“And going to the coffin...”: about Dostoevsky's meeting with Merezhkovsky in 1880

For the first time in Dostoevsky studies, the article analyzes closely and comprehensively the visit of the Silver Age aspiring poet, novelist and critic D. S. Merezhkovsky to the St. Petersburg apartment of the great writer in Kuznechny Lane, which took place at the end of 1880. Dostoevsky’s own testimony about this event is missing. All the sources known to date are reviewed and compared: “secondary memoirs” by N. S. Leskov (1888), memoirs by V. Mikulich (L. I. Veselitskaya) (1899) and “Autobiographical note” by Merezhkovsky (1913). The biographical, historical and literary context of the event has been recreated, and a more precise date of the visit has been established. As a result of the conducted research, it is concluded that the fragment from Merezhkovsky’s “Autobiographical note” dedicated to the 1880 meeting with Dostoevsky contains a bright, vivid, memorable image of the great writer and religious prophet, but it requires caution when viewed as a memoir testimony. The first reason is the “exculpatory” polemical message in regard to the interpretations of Leskov and Mikulich. The second is Merezhkovsky’s involvement in the general strategy of life-creating “self-creation.” Finally, the portrait of Dostoevsky presented here is not authentic, but is developed as a mythical artistic image based on a number of reliable empirical details, which has absorbed the ambiguous attitude of the symbolist writer to his great predecessor.