The unknown shorthand notes in the diary of Anna Dostoevskaya, or what didn’t Ceciliya Poshemanskaya manage to decipher

The shorthand diary of Dostoevsky’s wife remains today one of the most difficult textual problems. This document is valuable for researchers, as it is the primary and most reliable of some extent evidences of life and work of the writer in 1866-1867. This article presents the unknown facts from the history of deciphering and publishing of the diary found out thanks to the archival researches as well as the biographical data of the Leningrad stenographer Ceciliya Poshemanskaya. She was the only specialist who managed to reveal the content of this text, written in a “dead language”. The article describes the principles of Anna Dostoevskaya’s stenography that make the decipherment of the diary particularly difficult, specifies the main results of a critical analysis of the transcripts by Ceciliya Poshemanskaya that formed the basis of the editions of the diary of Anna Dostoevskaya in 1973 and 1993. This analysis was based on the comparison of the decrypted text by Ceciliya Poshemanskaya and the list of acronyms by Anna Dostoevskaya compiled by the authors of the article. It allowed characterizing the work of the Leningrad stenographer as scrupulous and explaining the reason of leaving some notes in the diary undeciphered and rare mistakes in their interpretation by a high complexity of the work that she performed on her own. The examples of the diary notes not decrypted, omitted or interpreted incorrectly by Poshemanskaya, presented in the article, do not change its general content, but supplement the picture of everyday life of the Dostoevskys and their relationship in 1867. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that it is necessary to republish the diary of the writer's wife with additions and corrections of the text and comments.