“…He Especially Loved His Sister, Vera Mikhailovna…” (the Writer’s Sister V. M. Dostoevskaya-Ivanova and Her Family: Additions to “The Chronicle of the Generations of Dostoevskys”)

The article presents the results of archival searches devoted to the family of F. M. Dostoevsky’s middle sister, Vera Mikhailovna Ivanova, whom, according to the testimony of the writer’s wife, her husband loved especially much. Twenty-four metric certificates of birth, wedding and death of the members of the Ivanov family are being introduced into scientific circulation, and the birth records of all thirteen children of V. M. and A. P. Ivanov are presented with exhaustive completeness. For the first time the exact dates of birth and death are indicated for Dostoevsky’s three nieces. The case discovered by the authors in the Central State Archive of Moscow (CGA of Moscow), “On the Inclusion in the Genealogy Book of the Actual State Councilor Alexander Pavlovich Ivanov, with His Family,” which includes previously unknown versions of the formulary lists of Vera Mikhailovna’s husband and their son Alexander, has also been put into scientific circulation. Based on new archival documents, a critical analysis of previously published biographical data on representatives of this branch of the Dostoevskys’ family tree was carried out and adjustments were made to eliminate errors and inaccuracies that occurred in printed publications, including the memoirs of A. M. Dostoevsky. The published archival materials fill in the significant shortage of sources in the lineage records of the genealogical branch of Vera Mikhailovna Dostoevskaya-Ivanova, which was published in the fundamental “The Chronicle of the Generations of Dostoevskys” (2012), which was a revised and supplemented reprint of the classic work of M. V. Volotskoy “The Chronicle of the Generations of Dostoevsky” (1933). The article also lists ten Moscow addresses where the Ivanovs lived in 1846–1868, with special attention paid to the addresses where F. M. Dostoevsky visited his sister and her family more than once in 1859–1867. A separate aspect of the research was the development of a methodology for using archival materials in genealogical research, demonstrating the need to be critical of a certain type of data contained in historical documents (for example, the age of persons indicated in confessional lists, wedding and death records, revision tales, etc.) using specific examples.