Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological journal is a peer-reviewed open-access journal, published by the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Research Centre “Dostoevsky and World Culture”). The journal is dedicated to research about the work and life of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), the influence world culture had on him, and the influence he had on culture worldwide. The journal is one of the successors (the other one being Dostoevsky and World Culture. A Petersburg Almanac, Editor-in-Chief Boris N. Tikhomirov) of the Almanac Dostoevsky and World Culture, founded in 1992 by Karen A. Stepanian with the help of Bella N. Rybalko, director of the Literary Museum F.M. Dostoevsky in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg during 1971-1994.

For many people, the importance of Dostoevsky and the reason of the interest for him lies in the capacity of his texts to change their way of understanding life, looking at themselves and their roles in the world: his works discover levels of being, depths that they were unable to see before. Philosophers, theologians, and saints call Dostoevsky their mentor and teacher. The mission of the journal is, above all, to attract and support research that through the methods of microanalysis, slow reading, and hermeneutical circle seeks to reveal the meanings that the author communicates in the text, being convinced that “art, for example, at least in a novelist, is the ability to express in the faces and the images of the novel your thought so clearly that the reader, reading the novel, can understand the writer’s thought as perfectly as the writer himself understood it while creating his work” (Dostoevsky, 1972-1990, vol. 18, p. 80).

This kind of research requires an accurate reading of the original texts. Therefore, part of our mission is the support and engagement of textual studies dedicated to the correction of reading errors in Dostoevsky’s texts.

Dostoevsky absorbed vast layers of the culture that preceded him, and studies about it are important for the understanding of his texts if they concentrate not only on the similarities, but also the differences, the transformation that he produced in the very foundation of what he learned. He also influenced the culture after him, and it is important for us to research the reception of his work in contemporary culture, a question that is also related to the problem of the translation of his works into other national languages and in the languages of other arts.

Dostoevsky, creating, aimed to transform the reader, and an important field of research for us is the study of the method the writer used in organizing his texts, in order to achieve his goal.

The journal Editors (Tatiana Kasatkina, Nikolay Podosokorsky, Tatiana Magaril-Il’yaeva, and Caterina Corbella) are also the scientific supervisors of the International Readings “F.M. Dostoevsky in the Perception of 21^st-Century Readers”, founded in 1999. The Readings are organized as an experience of equal collaboration among the Academy, university, museum, and school. The youngest participants of the Reading – pupils and university students – can publish their original research in the section “Young Readings”.

The journal is published in cooperation with the Commission for the Study of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Artistic Heritage at the Academic Council “History of World Culture” of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Our work is carried out in close contact with the Russian and International Dostoevsky Society. The journal is addressed to an international audience and publishes works by Russian and foreign scholars in the fields of philology, history, cultural studies, philosophy, theology, psychology, and art.

Aims and Goals of the Journal

The aim of the journal is to publish highly professional and conceptual works about Dostoevsky by scholars of different directions and methodologies.

Goals of the journal:

1. Publication of hermeneutic research on Dostoevsky’s work and research about his poetics, based on rigorous analysis of the texts and connotated by a high level of evidence and credibility, where the presence and functioning of the identified principles in the text are clearly demonstrated.
2. Publication of research on textual criticism, aiming to present to readers and scholars the original version of Dostoevsky’s texts.
3. Publication of research concerning Dostoevsky’s both possible and established readings, support of research about the restoration of the cultural context of his time, notably, the aspects that were lost for ideological reasons or simply excluded from attention during the Soviet era.
4. Publication of research concerning translation, cultural reception, and cultural transfer of Dostoevsky’s works.
5. Publication of research related to the translation of Dostoevsky’s works into the language of other arts and their use in the codes of other Humanities. Publication of interviews with authors of dramatizations and performances, actors, and artists.
6. Publication of research concerning memorable places and biography of Dostoevsky, the organization of museums, and the promotion of his heritage.
7. Publication of thoughtful and in-depth reviews of new studies devoted to Dostoevsky, translated research, and foreign works introduced for the first time into the Russian-speaking context.

Journal content

Readers are offered original research, publication of panel discussions (including expert discussions), reviews, and summaries of conferences in the following areas:

- Hermeneutics. Slow Reading

- Poetics. Context

- Dostoevsky’s journalism

- Textual Criticism

- Dostoevsky’s readings

- Dostoevsky in theatre and cinema

- Visual arts and Dostoevsky’s work

- Problems of translation and reception

- Comparative research

- Biography

- Archive

- Museums

- Reviews and summaries on monographic and collective works dedicated to Dostoevsky