“Diary in the Literal Sense” or a Subtle Literary Game? Dostoevsky on His Way to a Monojournal

In February 1876, the first issue of A Writer’s Diary, one of Dostoevsky’s most controversial works, was published. Manifesting the future as a “diary in the literal sense of the word”, the author was not entirely sincere. Already in April of the same year, in a letter to Kh. Alchevskaya, he remarked that he was too naive to think that this would be a real diary, and that a real diary was almost impossible, so there was only an ostentatious one, for the public. The ambivalent position of the writer himself gives researchers a reason to call this work the “object of a subtle literary game”, which imitated the properties of the diary genre. If we turn to the original notebooks with diary entries, we will be disappointed. Dostoevsky’s personal records are surprisingly sparse. As a rule, he makes them for practical reasons. Accuracy and convenience are much more important than analyzing what is happening. Most often, entries are lists of mortgaged items, which contain the number, cost, and terms of the mortgage. Dostoevsky writes down epileptic seizures just as carefully, probably trying to keep a “medical history”. It seems that Dostoevsky forced himself to make notes. He wrote out dates in calligraphy, built a hierarchy of titles, but stopped keeping the “diary” after the first two or three entries. The only exception was his Journal of Treatment in Bad Ems, which meticulously reflects the entire monthly course of procedures - from Thursday, June 25, to Saturday, July 25, 1874. But these records are extremely concise. There is no internal dialogue: no reflection, no assessment of events; moreover, there are no traces of work on the records. It seems that the diary of the writer Dostoevsky interests Dostoevsky the writer least of all. Among the several thousand hand-written pages of worksheets only a few pages contain a private record. Only the most intense experiences (the death of his wife, serious financial problems, a series of epileptic seizures, the death of his brother, the fear of his own death) make Dostoevsky break through a certain prohibition he himself set. The works that came out of Dostoevsky’s workbooks - novels, novellas, articles, and notes - had a long way to go: all of them except the diaries. Apparently, the subconscious feeling of this impasse is connected with Dostoevsky’s persistent unwillingness to keep a diary. A diary that would make him use up in writing notebook after notebook. Workbooks show that Dostoevsky made himself keep a diary and constantly refused to do it for almost fifteen years until he was able to treat the diary as if it were a fiction text: to put the diary in quotation marks, to make the diary of Dostoevsky A Writer’s Diary by Dostoyevsky thus making the diary а monojournal. Dostoevsky’s brilliant imitation changed the attitude to the diary as a genre. Several decades later, the diary further expanded its genre boundaries - the ability to be both personal records and a work of art at the same time.

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