Abstract: Information, already available, about the perception of the early works of Fyodor Dostoevsky — the novel “Poor Folk” and the story “The Double” — by the Aksakovs is for the first time introduced into scientific circulation and summarised in our article. A comparative analysis of the assessment of these writings, on the one hand, by Vera Aksakova and her cousin Mariya Kartashevskaya in the correspondence of early 1846, and on the other hand, by Konstantin Aksakov, in a review published in 1847, is produced. It turns out that even before being acquainted with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works, the Aksakovs were prejudiced against him, above all, because that writer was nominated by the Westernisers’ party led by Vissarion Belinsky as if in contrast to Nikolai Gogol with the “Slavophil spirit” of the latter. Special attention is paid to contextual information about the reading circle of the Aksakov sisters, which allows to explain a certain sharpness in their judgements. The sisters’ tastes had been shaped by romantic aesthetics, a theory of “aimless” creative work, whereas reading preferences were dictated by the emotional tone of the literary work. Therefore, in their perception, the “uneasy” prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky lost to the “refreshing” writing of Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and Fredrika Bremer without scoring a point.
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