The poems “the missive of Belinsky to Dostoevsky”: results and problems of the study

The article is dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of the problems of studying the poetic “The Missive of Belinsky to Dostoevsky” (“A knight of a sad character…”), that is a burlesque text hardly survived to our days in the lists of different credibility and without a definite authorship. The former research approaches to the problems of poem's sources, authorship and dating are generalized and analyzed in a critical way in the article. A hypothesis, put forward before by V. N. Zakharov, about the participation in the creation of this joint writing of Ivan Panaev along with Turgenev and Nekrasov, is confirmed. Based on the analysis of the architectonics of “The Missive…” a reasoned hypothesis about two editions of the text - an early, brief one and a final, detailed one, is presented. The article makes an attempt of reconstruction of the brief edition that complies better with a genre type of “The Missive…”. In the context of the given hypothesis about the history of the text of the writing the approaches to its dating were specified. The article makes comments on some content elements of the text providing additional information for solving the given problems.