The Marks of a Hoax: Dickens and Dostoevsky

Copy of a Photograph of Charles Dickens (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Russian literature specialist Eric Naiman describes a fake anecdote in "When Dickens met Dostoevsky," (TLS 10 April 2013), and the bizarre, convoluted, trail that led him to find multiple pseudonyms of someone who seems to be a disgruntled independent scholar. I think some points turned up in his detective work show the typical marks of a hoax, and point to the deeper civilizational issues raised by falsehood.

Naiman traces "the connections between A. D. Harvey, Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra" who may be real friends of "A.D. Harvey" or pseudonyms. (The erotica connection may make your head spin!)

The Dickens-Dostoevsky story is supposed to have appeared in a letter of Dostoevsky describing a meeting with Dickens during his first visit to London. The visit to London happened. The visit to Dickens, in which he bared his soul never happened. But it sounded so good. The fake story originated in an unassuming scholarly note by "Stephanie Harvey" in a Dickens journal, citing an obscure note in an obscure Soviet journal. (Dickens lovers cited the piece in reviews, which brought it to the attention to Russian lit specialists who questioned the story's authenticity.) The fake story itself has some interesting marks of a successful and, indeed, powerful fake.