The lost letter of E. F. Yunge to F. M. Dostoevsky

The article aims to explore the correspondence between F. M. Dostoevsky and the famous artist and memoirist E. F. Junge, who was the wife of ophthalmologist Dr. E. A. Junge. Dostoevsky was Dr. Junge’s patient in the 1860s and 1870s. E. F. Junge met the writer in the last year of his life, and she was an admirer of his talent, as well as a correspondent. Two letters from E. F. Junge to the writer, sent in March and April of 1880, are known to exist. There are also two letters from Dostoevsky, one in draft form and the other a clean copy, dated April 10 and April 11 of the same year. The study places special emphasis on the autograph of Junge’s March letter to the writer. This letter was initially published by the bibliographer A. P. Novitsky in the preface to Junge’s memoirs, which were published in 1914. However, the autograph of the letter was subsequently lost. As a result, the letter written by Junge in March 1880 has been quoted from either the first publication or its republication, which was done in 1959 by A. S. Dolinin. In 2021, during the preparation of the description for “The Handwritten Legacy of F. M. Dostoevsky,” efforts were made to search for the document in the collections of the State Historical Museum, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Arts, and the Russian State Historical Archive. Unfortunately, this search yielded no results. The authors of the article eventually found a copy of the lost letter to Junge in A. G. Dostoevskaya’s notebook from 1881. Unlike Novitsky’s publication, this copy more accurately reflects the original letter. Therefore, the source for any future publications of the lost letter of Junge should be considered the copy found in A. G. Dostoevskaya’s notebook. The article also analyzes letters from the 1880s-1890s addressed to A. G. Dostoevskaya from E. F. Junge, as well as from A. I. Tolstaya (her mother) and A. P. Novitsky. For the first time, a donation inscription to Novitsky from the writer’s widow on the title page is published. The annex to the article includes three documents: a list of the March 1880 letter from E. F. Junge to Dostoevsky, taken from his widow’s notebook; a response letter from the writer, which reflects the edits he made and indicates errors in previous publications of the letter; and a letter from A. P. Novitsky to A. G. Dostoevskaya dated April 25, 1897.