“On Saturdays we went to take lessons in mathematics to Lamovsky”: Alexander Mikhailovich Lamovsky and the Dostoevsky family

Alexander Mikhailovich Lamovsky (Lomovsky), a well-known mathematics teacher in Moscow and the founder of the Russian Hunting Club, has been interacting with the Dostoevsky family for many years. He was a friend of F. M. Dostoevsky at L. I. Chermak’s boarding school. In the 1830s and 1840s Lamovsky also taught mathematics to all the Dostoevsky brothers; he continued to communicate with Fyodor Mikhailovich, having become one of the leading teachers at the Konstantinovsky Land-Surveying Institute. The article presents the data from A. M. Lamovsky’s formulary list dated April 27, 1850, as well as information about him and his family from little-known essays, obituaries and archival documents. These materials made it possible to describe the pedagogical and official activities of A. M. Lamovsky, to determine the attitude towards him not only of people close to him, but also of pupils and teachers of the Land-Surveying Institute. Thanks to his high professionalism, he became the right-hand man of both A. L. Apukhtin (the director of the Konstantinovsky Land-Surveying Institute) and M. N. Muravyev, a trustee of this institution. Noting Lamovsky's professional and public achievements, the authors of the article pointed out that Lamovsky became one of the few friends of Dostoevsky at the Chermak boarding school with whom the writer met later on in life: they may have seen each other in the 1860s and 1870s during Dostoevsky’s stay in Moscow. The writer noted the surname “Lamovsky” in his notebook of 1862-1864, intending to use his friend’s hunting story “about quails” in the story “The Double,” but did not do it due to a lack of time for a cardinal revision of the work. This untold story has remained a mystery in Dostoevsky's biography and creative history.