One case of literary influence: the short story Why did he kill them? by Alexander Shklyarevsky and The House of the dead by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Recently, the prose of Alexander Shklyarevsky, a popular Russian fiction writer of the XIX century, has repeatedly attracted the attention of researchers, including those who study literary contacts of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The fact of their personal acquaintance is known, Shklyarevsky’s letters to Dostoevsky were preserved, and an opinion has been held about the impact of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment on Shklyarevsky’s prose. The study of the editorial archive of the Citizen magazine during the period of Dostoevsky’s editorship points to a new source for analyzing this range of issues - Shklyarevsky’s story Why Did He Kill Them?, to which he refers in one of his letters, confessing to being Dostoevsky’s disciple. This criminal story mentions Dostoevsky himself, uses the “Dead House” metaphor twice, and contains semantic and formal parallels with The House of the Dead (i. e., the image of an intelligent criminal, the motif of murder, and the names of the victims of crime). Analyzing Dostoevsky’s intertext in the story Why did he kill them? enables us to clarify the boundaries and the nature of this literary influence. The revealed similarities stress the differences in the authors’ narration strategy, reflecting their different views on the nature of crime. Biographical materials and epistolary documents are used as the nearest context for the research analysis.