Dostoevsky Literary and Local History Museum in Dostoevo

This year the world celebrates the 200th anniversary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a great Russian writer, thinker and religious philosopher. Today, his legacy attracts the attention of experts, philologists, intellectuals and lovers of Russian literature. His novels are studied in schools and universities. Many are familiar with the biography of the writer, but very few people know that the Dostoevsky family hails from the Belarusian town of Dostoevo (today Ivanovo District, Brest Oblast). On 6 October 1506, the Pinsk duke granted boyar Daniil Rtishchev a title deed for several villages...

Daniil Rtishchev’s descendants made the Polesie region with its pristine nature and fishing grounds on the Pina River and the Yaselda River their home: his first son Ivan received the double surname Rtishchev-Dostoevsky, and subsequent children became Dostoevsky. All in all, the family tree features 370 people with this surname, and one of its branches leads to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Thus, Dostoevo played an important role in the genesis of the writer's surname.

In Dostoevo there is the Dostoevsky Literary and Local History Museum. It was opened in the local secondary school in 1982. Every year it welcomes about 3,000 visitors. Today its holdings keep more than 3,000 exhibits, including rarities like cartographic materials of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries, a 17th-century travel book of a monk of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. The exposition also features a photograph of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the writer’s biography of 1891, the novel Poor Folk published in 1912, his works translated into various languages, unique archival materials about members of the Dostoevsky family.

Dmitry Dostoevsky, a great-grandson of the great Russian writer, came from St. Petersburg to visit the museum in the spring of 2009. Dostoevsky’s great-grandson Aleksei serves in the monastery fleet on the island of Valaam. Representatives of the younger generation of the Dostoevsky family still go to school or study at university.

The exposition of the museum in Dostoevo is replenished with new valuable editions and items: for example, in 2018  three-volume facsimile The Gospel in Dostoevskywas donated to the museum by representatives of the Tobolsk Revival Foundation. It contains more than a thousand handwritten notes made by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In 2011 the museum received a 20-volume collection of Dostoevsky’s works from the Eurasian Economic Community.

A resolution to restore the homestead of the Dostoevsky family in Ivanovo District was adopted at the international conference “F.M. Dostoevsky: a historical dialogue of like-minded people” held in Ivanovo in 2019.

On 11-12 November 2021 Dostoevo welcomed philologists, literary scholars and linguists from Brest, Grodno and Minsk, Russia’s Moscow, Petrozavodsk, Volgograd, Irkutsk and Magadan, China’s Changchun, Ukraine’s Chernovtsy and Azerbaijan’s capital Baku for the international conference “The personality and work of F.M. Dostoevsky in the context of the common cultural paradigm”. The event celebrated the writer’s 200th birthday.