There is a widespread rumor that the Russian classic was sexually attracted to little girls. We decided to check whether such accusations are justified.
In recent years, one of the main popularizers of the point of view that Dostoevsky was attracted to minors was the publicist Alexander Nevzorov. For example, on June 30, 2023, in his Telegram channel, he reported, that the Russian Orthodox Church allegedly proposed to “remove from sale” toys in the form of American comic book heroes and replace them with “figurines of Suvorov and Dostoevsky.” Although the Russian Orthodox Church did not put forward such an initiative, but only in the person of the head of the Synodal Department for Relations between the Church and Society and the Media, Vladimir Legoyda supported Nevzorov commented on the idea of the Association of Manufacturers of Children's Goods and Services to create toys that “promote large families”: “The Dostoevsky toy will be incomplete without the accompanying set of little peasant girls in easily removable sundresses. After all, Dostoevsky, oh, how he loved to order “a little peasant girl of five to seven years old” into his bathhouse for shameful pleasures.” The publicist’s post had received more than 574,000 views at the time of writing this analysis.
This is not the first time that Nevzorov has declared the pedophilia of a classic of Russian literature. So, at the end of 2017, in a video on his YouTube channel, he commented news that Dostoevsky was proposed to be canonized (corresponding media reports for that period “Verified” could not be found). “The iconographic image of the new saint will undoubtedly be a hit. The Prophet Fyodor can be depicted naked in a steam room with a naked peasant girl of ten years old, taken there for his bathing pleasures,” the publicist argues in the video, which has received 265,000 views. In 2013, in an article for Moskovsky Komsomolets, Nevzorov wrote about “little peasant girls who were taken to the bathhouse for pedophilic fun by the generator of Orthodox spirituality (Dostoevsky - Ed.)”.
In all three cases (although they list similar statements by Nevzorov not limited to) the publicist refers to Strakhov’s letter; in a recent post on Telegram and in an article for Moskovsky Komsomolets, it is clarified that this is Dostoevsky’s biographer, and the letter was sent to Leo Tolstoy in 1883.
What was said in Strakhov’s letter?
A letter from publicist Nikolai Strakhov to Tolstoy, in which he reported Dostoevsky’s alleged pedophilic tendencies, is indeed exists. The author refers to another contemporary - literary historian and professor at Dorpat University Pavel Viskovatov. “He (Dostoevsky - Ed.) was drawn to dirty tricks, and he boasted about them. Viskovatov began to tell me how he boasted that he had fornicated in the bathhouse with a little girl who was brought to him by the governess,” Strakhov wrote. The text did not contain any other details (let alone evidence) of the writer’s vicious preferences.
This letter was written in 1883, and for the first time published in the magazine “Modern World” only in 1913, three years after the death of Tolstoy and 17 years after the death of Strakhov.
What do biographers and literary scholars say?
Most researchers who have studied this story tend to consider it untrue.
The first zealous defender of the writer’s honorable name was his widow Anna Dostoevskaya. In 1914 she wrote to her husband’s nephew: “I just can’t get rid of the depressing state into which Strakhov’s slander plunged me, it has become some kind of nightmare for me.” Later, in her memoirs, Dostoevskaya reasoned: “If Nikolai Nikolaevich were alive, I, despite my advanced years, would immediately go to him and hit him in the face for this baseness.”
On the initiative of the writer’s widow in 1914, it was compiled and published open letter, signed by many famous people of that time, in defense of the desecrated name of the writer.
The story of the molestation of a young girl was called fiction by a literary critic and honorary president of the International Dostoevsky Society. Vladimir Zakharov. “Both “rumours” and “anecdotes” are not valid; they do not withstand critical verification of facts. This is an ordinary slander of Dostoevsky’s literary enemies and enemies,” he wrote in his work “Problems in the Study of Dostoevsky,” published in 1978.
Writer and literary critic Igor Volgin in the book “Born in Russia” (1991), dedicated to the life and work of Dostoevsky, also calls a story about a sexual encounter with a little girl. “The bashfully gleeful rumor will accuse him of molesting a minor. The act of Nikolai Stavrogin, which remained unknown to the general public (this episode of Dostoevsky will be forced to be excluded from “Demons”), will be imputed to the author. Russian writers are no strangers to slander. But it seems that none of them have ever received such abomination,” Volgin wrote.
Poet and literary critic Lev Oborin in 2016 wrote about this story as false in his column on The Question portal. In particular, he drew attention to the fact that Viskovatov, who allegedly told Strakhov about Dostoevsky’s passions, was not any close acquaintance of the writer.
Sergei Kibalnik, a literary critic and professor at St. Petersburg State University, also considers the story about Dostoevsky the pedophile unreliable. In 2018 he published article entitled “Towards the solution to one writer’s defamation: why did N. N. Strakhov slander Dostoevsky?”, in which he suggested that Strakhov harbored a grudge against Dostoevsky because he recognized himself in Rakitin, not the most pleasant character in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”.
Philologist, chief researcher at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences Liya Rosenblum assumedthat Strakhov, who after Dostoevsky’s death in 1881 was sorting through his archive to prepare his collected works, could have discovered a very negative review of himself in the writer’s notebook. Realizing that this entry, like Tolstoy’s correspondence, would be published in the future, the critic decided on “long-term sabotage,” the researcher admits. As a result, the notebook was published only in the 1970s, and for more than half a century it was believed that Strakhov had no motive to slander Dostoevsky.
Did any of his contemporaries, besides Strakhov, accuse Dostoevsky?
In addition to the “Strakhov” version of the origin of hearing, there is also the “Turgenev” version. For example, the above-mentioned Vladimir Zakharov and Dostoevsky biography researcher Vitaly Svintsov wrote about her. Both considered the story of the girl’s molestation to be fiction, but tried to figure out why she was born.
That's it it says in Svintsov’s article “Dostoevsky and Stavrogin’s sin” (1995): “The rumor that Stavrogin’s plot is biographical for Dostoevsky arose during his lifetime. One of the primary sources of the rumor was Turgenev. He said that Dostoevsky himself admitted to him that he had molested the girl. Accumulating with details, the rumor existed for some time in the form of near-literary folklore, which did not extend beyond a narrow circle. His first breakthrough in print apparently dates back to 1908. Several St. Petersburg periodicals (Petersburgskaya Gazeta, Russkoe Slovo, Rus), having discussed the sensational material that came to their attention, regarded it as gossip. It seemed that the rumor about Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin sin would be forgotten forever. However, in 1913 this story was continued.”
It is worth noting here that neither Svintsov nor Zakharov before him quote Turgenev himself (it seems that he did not leave a written statement about his colleague’s pedophilia), but again refer to retellings of third parties, which makes the “Turgenev” version even less reliable than the “Strakhov” version.
“The enmity especially intensified after the writing of “Demons,” where Turgenev was easily discerned in the image of the pitiful Karmazinov. According to Zakharov, the spread of rumors about Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin sin became something of a retaliatory strike from Turgenev. Turgenev probably spoke repeatedly and in different versions about Dostoevsky’s self-recognition. One of these stories was reproduced in detail in the memoirs of [the writer, journalist and critic Hieronymus] Yasinsky, who believed that Dostoevsky himself was to blame for the circulation of rumors about his “sensitivity,” wrote Svintsov.
Who else believed in the authenticity of this story?
Sigmund Freud briefly spoke about the molestation of a young girl as a possible fact in Dostoevsky’s biography. article “Dostoevsky and Parricide” (1928): “The question arises: where does the temptation to classify Dostoevsky as a criminal come from? Answer: due to the choice of his subjects, these are predominantly rapists, murderers, egocentric characters, which indicates the existence of such inclinations in his inner world, and also due to some facts of his life: his passion for gambling, perhaps the sexual molestation of an immature girl.”
In addition, Sergei Kibalnik, in the article mentioned above, wrote about “many philosophers and writers who believed this slander,” including Lev Shestov And Viktor Erofeev.
***
Thus, the story of Dostoevsky the pedophile is based on two very unreliable pieces of evidence. The first of them is a statement by the publicist Strakhov, who referred to the oral history of the literary historian Viskovatov, and was not supported by anything other than this. The second is the rumors that circulated in literary circles during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, and references to which have survived to this day thanks to meticulous researchers (they, in turn, consistently did not believe these rumors).
Literary scholars have many versions as to what exactly caused these rumors: they name the personal hostility of Strakhov and Turgenev, and the overly naturalistic descriptions of the “Stavrogin sin” in “The Possessed,” and the writer’s own possible oral statements, caused either by a desire to shock, or by the author’s getting used to the personality of his character.
As for the actual crime, the consensus assessment of the literary community for many decades has been that the story of Dostoevsky's molestation of a young girl is unreliable.
By the way, neither the “Strakhov” nor the “Turgenev” version mentions the age of Dostoevsky’s alleged victim. Apparently, Nevzorov, who wrote in his recent publication about a “baby peasant girl of five to seven years old,” and earlier spoke about a “peasant girl of ten years old,” simply made up these figures.
Cover photo: Wikimedia Commons
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