Ivan Bogdanov, a mysterious belletrist of the citizen weekly

The aim of the article is to establish the identity of Ivan Bogdanov, a belletrist and art columnist who worked for The Citizen weekly magazine between 1872 and 1876, using epistolary sources, notes from Fyodor Dostoevsky's notebook of 1872-1875, memoirs of Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, who published The Citizen, and data from a number of reference publications from the late XIX and the early XX centuries. This research is a contribution to making a comprehensive list of The Citizen staff members during Dostoevsky's editorship, as well as to reconstructing the biographies of unrenowned contributors to the magazine with the help of archival and other sources. The study enabled us to firmly establish that The Citizen's columnist Ivan Ivanovich Bogdanov (born in the early 1840s, died in the early 1880s) was a younger brother of a famous satirist and a poet Vasiliy Ivanovich Bogdanov, who was permanently employed by The Spark magazine. The revealed biographical information gives us reasons to suggest, for the first time, that Ivan Bogdanov was one of the prototypes of a “silent observer” (a “certain person”), a collective character of Dostoevsky's short story “Bobok” and his satirical sketch “A Half-Letter from ‘a Certain Person'”.