'Maccary.' A Mysterious Note in F. M. Dostoevsky's Notebook from 1869-1870

Abstract

The article highlights a number of versions that explain the appearance of the calligraphic note “Maccary” in F. M. Dostoevsky's notebook from 18691870, probably made on December 8/20, 1870, while he was thinking about the plan for the novel “The Life of a Great Sinner”, conceived as a series of works united by a common plot. Several possible hypotheses are considered — an allusion to E. Zola's “Rougon-Macquart,” a mention of the Italian artist Cesare Maccari, the American theologian William MacCary, the 16^th century Arab scholar. Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari, as well as Dr. Ange (Angelo) Maccari, the author of a monumental work on the diagnosis and treatment of hysteria, which was interpreted at that time as a mental illness related to epilepsy. As is known, the writer suffered from this disease all his life, was very interested in this topic, in his youth he actively read and commented on medical literature from the library of his close friend and attending physician S. D. Yanovsky. In his work, the writer widely used the medical term “hysteria,” which, in accordance with the concepts of medical science of the first half of the 19^th century, included a wide range of mental illnesses, and also described the symptoms of severe nervous disorders of his characters with an undoubted knowledge of the characteristic symptoms of sthenic and asthenic variants of this disease. The article analyzes the work of A. Maccari with the clarification of the possible range of allusive connections of his work with a number of episodes of the writer's works — the story “The Eternal Husband,” the novels “Crime and Punishment,” “The Idiot,” “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”