Publishing Practice of Dostoevskys and Tolstoys: Intersections, Similarities, and Differences

The article is devoted to the publishing activities of the writer’s wives — A. G. Dostoevskaya and S. A. Tolstaya. Based on documentary sources, the article analyzes the history of their acquaintance and business communication. A study of A. G. Dostoevskaya’s selected subscription books for her husband’s Complete Works confirmed that by the mid-1880s, when she met S. A. Tolstaya, the St. Petersburg publisher had developed an effective system for printing and selling books, which she willingly shared with Tolstoy’s wife, an aspiring book publisher. However, S. A. Tolstaya’s publishing activities had their own specific features: unlike A. G. Dostoevskaya, she had to repeatedly overcome censorship restrictions. The article suggests that the publication of Tolstaya’s husband’s literary works created before 1881, on the one hand, and the publication of Tolstaya’s banned texts outside of Russia, on the other, laid the foundation for the formation of two distinct images of the writer in the culture of the late 19th and 20th centuries: Leo Tolstoy as an artist and Leo Tolstoy as a religious thinker, public figure, and rebel. The authors hypothesize that one of the main reasons for the conflict between Leo Tolstoy and his wife, which began in the second half of the 1880s, was not her publishing activities, but their phenomenal commercial success. Indirectly, the meeting between the two businesswomen played a significant role in Tolstaya’s rapid adoption of Dostoevskaya’s publishing expertise, which allowed her to successfully navigate the book market and, in turn, led to a confrontation with her husband. The article’s appendix includes two letters from S. A. Tolstaya to A. G. Dostoevskaya, dated October 17 and November 26, 1885 (with the correct dating of the second letter, which was incorrectly dated by A. G. Dostoevskaya), as well as two letters from T. A. Kuzminskaya, S. A. Tolstaya’s sister, to Dostoevsky’s widow, which require accurate dating.