Afterword to the Exhibition “Prince Myshkin, A. S. Pushkin’s Nephew”

In 2024, the State Museum of A. S. Pushkin hosted the exhibition “Prince Myshkin, A. S. Pushkin’s Nephew: The Literary Character and the Prototype,” dedicated to the 190th anniversary of L. N. Pavlishchev, where documents and relics from the Pavlishchev family archive were presented for the first time, providing authentic evidence of the Pavlishchevs’ and Dostoevskys’ interactions and family ties. Certain facts from L. N. Pavlishchev’s biography confirm his presumed involvement in shaping the image of Prince Myshkin. The article describes the history of studying Pavlishchev’s archive in the context of creating an exhibition project. From the very beginning, this research required unconventional approaches based on establishing family and friendship ties, followed by the compilation of a family tree (genealogical chart and generation list) of the Pavlishchev noble family. It was important to verify and compare genealogical and biographical information from published and unpublished sources, which allowed us to discover previously unknown facts and eliminate widespread misconceptions. As part of the research, archival documents and memorial items were searched for in museum and archival institutions, and two main parts of the Pavlishchev archive were identified: the “Moscow” part, which belonged to the Slonimsky family of Pushkin scholars, and the “St. Petersburg” part, which belonged to L. N. Pavlishchev. When creating the exhibition, we wanted to demonstrate the diversity of materials stored in museums and archives, focusing on objects and archival documents that are directly or indirectly related to the history of the creation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “The Idiot.”