Dostoevsky and World Culture Dostoevsky and World Culture 2619-0311 2712-8512 IWL RAS https://doi.org/10.22455/2619-0311-2025-4-232-276 Research Article Articles From the History of Dostoevsky Studies in the 1920s: On the Centenary of the Founding of the Dostoevsky Research Group at ILYAZV Druzhinin Petr A. fedor@dostmirkult.ru 25 12 2025 1 4 232 276 Leningrad School of Philology 1920s Dostoevsky ILYAZV Komarovich Dolinin Copyright © 2026, IWL RAS 2026 The article presents previously unknown materials on the study of Dostoevsky’s works at the Institute for the Comparative Study of the Literatures and Languages of the West and East (ILYAZV) in the 1920s. Founded in 1919 at Petrograd University, ILYAZV became, thanks to N.Ya. Marr, the largest scholarly center of the 1920s, which concentrated the leading philological forces of the USSR. In 1924, a group dedicated to the study of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre was established within ILYAZV, headed by the prominent Dostoevsky scholar V.L. Komarovich. Because the material and ideological difficulties of the 1920s prevented ILYAZV staff from publishing their scholarly works on time, the primary form of public presentation for Dostoevsky researchers at the Institute became academic lectures and reports. These forms played an essential role in the scholarship of the time, yet information about them was scarcely published. For this reason, both the activities of ILYAZV itself and the Institute’s work on Dostoevsky have remained largely unaccounted for in the history of the Humanities. Drawing on a thorough analysis of ILYAZV archival materials preserved in several archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow, the article reconstructs the history of the activities of the Group for the Study of Dostoevsky’s Works and provides previously unknown information on the scholarly reports delivered by ILYAZV researchers on the writer. Special attention is devoted to uncovering biographical materials on scholars whose research interests in the 1910s–1920s included Dostoevsky’s legacy. The collection of previously unpublished documents presented here makes it possible to clarify the range of scholarly topics and research directions associated with the study of Dostoevsky in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Particularly valuable are documents published for the first time in this article, written by prominent figures in the humanities, among them Academician Aleksei Shakhmatov and the classical scholar and writer Vyacheslav Ivanov.