> “that the letter isn’t genuine, which is rather sad, because the idea of the two men meeting is so wonderful.”
I may be biased, but to me Dickens looks like a bit of a hack publishing serials in newspapers, and Dostoevsky one of those serious writers dropping deep books once in a while.
Dostoevsky did publish in serials! This is related to a story. Before he finished Crime and Punishment, which was being serialized, he had to write a whole other novel in order to prevent an unscrupulous publisher from capturing the rights to all his future work. In the end he was saved by dictating The Gambler to a young woman named Anna Snitkina who was the star pupil at the local shorthand academy (shorthand was an innovation at the time). During the day, he would work on finishing Crime and Punishment while she worked on transcribing The Gambler. Then in the evenings, he would dictate the next part of The Gambler and she would get it in shorthand. They would talk about the characters too.
They finished on the last possible day. The publisher cunningly closed his office that day and ordered all his staff not to receive the manuscript, but Dostoevsky went to the local police station, handed it in, and got a receipt. Thus his career was rescued. And then he and Anna got married.
It's fitting that this high-stakes drama produced The Gambler (a great short book btw), since Dostoevsky had gotten into it in the first place because of his gambling addiction. The marriage was a long and happy one and his life stabilized after that. His books maybe got a tad less exciting though.
Re serials: it's mind blowing that so many great masterpieces of the novel were written and published that way, and yet are so coherent, Dickens included. How on earth did they do it?
Even Don Quixote was published in two parts, separated by a decade. In fact, there was so much clamoring for a sequel that someone else wrote a sequel and then Cervantes spends a bit of time (Chapter 59) in part two dealing with the author, Avellaneda.
BTW, if you like Russian literature, I recommend Possessed by Elif Batuman. It is her reading of Russian lit and a recounting of her travels in Russia and Turkey during graduate school at Stanford.
I got the glimpse of the demise of the Soviet empire (1970s+) - the literature revolved around monthly magazines. It wasn't hard to subscribe to one. They would publish homemade and overseas masterpieces in chunks. So we would wait until the end of a piece, rip it from the magazines and bind it in a book. I never thought about it, but it seems that serial writing/publishing was natural in those days. I suspect it has deeper roots.
When I read Crime and Punishment, I realised many of what I saw as flaws could be explained by the fact that it was published as a serial. You can't retcon what's already released.
I may be biased, but to me Dickens looks like a bit of a hack publishing serials in newspapers, and Dostoevsky one of those serious writers dropping deep books once in a while.