Dmitriev Andrey Petrovich – Doctor in Philology, Leading Researcher at the Department of Literary Studies of the Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences RAS; ORCID: 0000-0002-8460-4578
The article, based on Shevyrev’s unpublished epistolary and creative materials from the archives of the Institute of Russian Literature and the Russian National Library, clarifies the circumstances of Shevyrev’s work on the book History of Russian Literature in Italian, published in Florence in 1862 (in particular, it is proven that this book was completed in the summer of 1859, and was only slightly supplemented later). It has been established that Shevyrev gave 15 lectures from February to April 1861 in Florence and 18 from March to May 1862 in Paris. The draft lecture notes and their printed version are compared, Shevyrev’s reviews of Turgenev, Goncharov, Fet, Ostrovsky, Sergey and Ivan Aksakov, Count Leo Tolstoy, Saltykov-Shchedrin and others are considered. Study of Shevyrev’s letters to Prince Peter A. Vyazemsky, Michael N. Longinov, Peter A. Pletnev and eldest son Boris S. Shevyrev gives the opportunity to find out the writer’s goal setting, learn about the organization of lectures, about their high-society listeners, about the writer’s contacts with Italian intellectuals Niccolò Tommaseo and Francesco Dal’Ongaro, Nikolay A. Dobrolyubov, and the Polish historian Leonard Chodźko.
S.P. Shevyrev; literary criticism; oratory; educational goals; Slavophile ideology; archival sources