“I am here to work, not to make the acquaintance”: Fedor Dostoevsky and Anna Snitkina

150 years ago, on October 4th (October 17th), 1866, a stenographer Anna Snitkina came to work to the writer Dostoevsky. So, she made a life-changing acquaintance of him, which culminated in a happy marriage and a successful creative collaboration. The subject the acquaintance of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anna Snitkina is popular in Art and literature: it is embodied in the biographical researches, fiction, drama, cinema. At the heart of this publication there are the results of studying the creative process of writing memories by Anna Dostoevskaya about her acquaintance of the writer and their collaboration on the novel “The Gambler”. The author of the article has made a textual study of the extant editions and drafts of biographical memories of that period of Dostoevsky and his bride, made a comparison with the verbatim records of the diary of 1867. As a result, there were brought to light and considered auto censorial corrections and fragments that were not included in the last edition of memoirs at the discretion of the memoirist. These episodes of a draft manuscript are similar to verbatim records of the diary that are of greater factual certainty than memoirs. They reliably convey the circumstances and atmosphere of the first meeting of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anna Snitkina, their work, communication problems, particular traits of characters, habits and tastes.