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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Like Balzac and Dickens, Dostoevsky is one of the great mythographers of the modern city; and, like them, he was a journalist as well as a novelist. The motley contents of his Diary of a Writer are, if not well known, at least available to the curious in English translation. His journalism before 1873 is a different matter: this work remains untranslated and largely unexamined, though it contains much that sheds light on his artistic practice—including the feuilletons, published at the very beginning of his career and called, significantly, a “Petersburg Chronicle.” What they show us is the young writer, in search of a persona, confronting the city and experimenting with the themes and attitudes that would later go into his myth of Petersburg.
The terms of the experiment were in good part furnished by the times.
1 See 
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), to whom I am indebted for much of what follows. 
(St. Petersburg, 1922) is also useful on this subject.
2 Dostoevsky's friends Pleshcheev and Grigorev were writing feuilletons strikingly like his in the late forties—so much so that V. S. Nechaeva, a painstaking scholar of Dostoevsky's texts, was even led to include as part of his “Petersburg Chronicle” a piece that later proved to be Pleshcheev's (see 
op. cit., p. 123). As for Grigorev, compare this characterization of Petersburg, from a feuilleton of 1847: “In this new world there flashed before me a vein of life completely fantastic; a fearful mystic exhalation [veianie] swept over my moral nature—but, on the other hand, I recognized with the help of its rather dreary scent and its rather dirty color a strangely vulgar world” (quoted in 
op. cit., p. 135).
3 Quoted in 
op. cit., p. 97, n. 1.
4
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1928-59), I (1928), 84.
5
, Vol. XIII of his 
(Moscow and Leningrad, 1930), p. 594. The announcement appeared in 
in November, 1845.
6
, I, 75 (letter of Mar. 24, 1845). In the same letter he repeats, with evident approval, Béranger's characterization of contemporary French feuilletonistes as “a bottle of Chambertin in a bucket of water.“
7 The portions of the feuilletons quoted in this article have been translated from Vol. XIII, 
… , pp. 8-13 (installment of April 27); pp. 17-18 (May 11); pp. 20-23 (June 1); pp. 26-32 (June 15).
8 Dostoevsky's view of Petersburg architecture was to change radically with the years; cf. his Diary of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York, 1954), pp. 120-21. See also 
(New York, 1956), pp. 218-23.
9 The capitalization of “Nature” and the italics are not in the original, but have been added to render the difference between the Russian words priroda and natura.
10 See
, No. 43, 1955, pp. 63-80.
11 These arguments are couched in deliberately vague, though emphatic, terms; in the Russia of Nicholas I, their political implications could hardly be developed.
12 I have rendered as “visions” the Russian word snovideniia, which is literally compounded of the words for “dream” and “vision,” because “dream-visions” seemed both too cumbersome and too misleadingly reminiscent of an obsolete literary form.
13 See 
(St. Petersburg, 1883), p. 213; and (img), XIII, 595.
Passage, Charles E. in his Dostoevski the Adapter (Chapel Hill, 1954)Google Scholar relates as much as is known of the circumstances; see pp. 113-14.
14 Passage, op. cit., p. 114.
15
…, XIII, 350.
16 Ibid., pp. 155-56.
17 Ibid., p. 157.
18 Ibid., p. 160.
19 V. Komarovich was the first critic to make these points, in op. cit.; see esp. pp. 116-17. See also 
(Moscow, 1959), pp. 353-54.
