The unaccounted autograph of Dostoevsky (more on the writer’s calligraphy as a textological problem)

The article carries out a handwriting examination of the manuscript of Dostoevsky’s third “Siberian Ode” “The Terrible War Has Fallen Silent!” (1856), stored in the Russian State Military Historical Archive. The need for such an examination is due to the fact that the manuscript is written in a special type of handwriting, which contains elements of calligraphy. In this type of handwriting, the outlines of many elements are oriented to the standards of calligraphic writing, fixed in textbooks, while the individual features of the writer’s handwriting are significantly weakened, making it difficult to establish the status of the manuscript - a copy of a scribe or an autograph (in our case Dostoevsky). The methodology of handwriting expertise was developed by the author in the article “Calligraphic Elements in Dostoevsky’s Handwriting as a Textual Problem” (Unknown Dostoevsky. 2022. No. 2), where the manuscript of the first “Siberian Ode” of the writer “On European Events of 1854” was analyzed, in determining the status of which opposing decisions were made in authoritative periodicals (white autograph/clerical copy). The examination proved that the manuscript of the 1854 poem was Dostoevsky’s autograph. This article is a direct continuation of the article written in 2022. The manuscript of the poem “The Terrible War Has Fallen Silent!” is written in a handwriting very similar to that of the first “Siberian Ode,” however, since its first publication in 1935 and to this day the status of the 1856 manuscript was that of a clerical copy. The conducted handwriting expert examination proved that the manuscript of the third “Siberian Ode” is a white autograph of Dostoevsky.