Unpublished autograph of Dostoyevsky: Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Sergey Koloshin

The archive of Mikhail Pogodin, a Russian historian, publisher and journalist, deposited in the Russian State Library, contains an unpublished autograph of Dostoevsky. This is a text written by Dostoyevsky upon a note by Pogodin, which was received by the editorial board of the Epoch magazine in the second half (most probably in December) of 1864. Sergey Koloshin (1825-1868), a journalist and critic living at that time in Italy, was invited to contribute to the magazine upon recommendation of Ivan Aksakov and Mikhail Pogodin. In total, two of his articles were published in Epoch. In September-October of 1864 Dostoyevsky tried to get a censor’s permit to publish Koloshin’s article on the Polish question. His other materials were not accepted for publication. On Pogodin’s request, the editorial board returned the turned-down articles to Koloshin. In his response Dostoyevsky informed Pogodin that only one article written by Koloshin, the one about Jesuits (7 pages), was published after June 1864 and that the fixed fee for the article was 15 rubbles “in accordance with the genre of the article”. The payment was settled on February 25, 1865. Dostoyevsky’s response uncovers dramatic circumstances of Koloshin’s collaboration with the Epoch magazine. The name of Koloshin is mentioned 13 times over the period of six months in the writer’s notebooks for 1864-1865. From all editorial correspondence, only letters written by Koloshin to Mikhail and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have survived. Their answer letters to Koloshin were not found. What happened to the archive of the Russian man of letters who died in Florence on November 27 / December 9, 1868? Dostoevsky’s letters to Koloshin may still be waiting to be found.