The Good Wife

When they met, she was 20, he was 45. At that time, Dostoevsky was experiencing serious financial difficulties. He had a debt of 25 thousand rubles. Fyodor Mikhailovich, who worked on the novel "Crime and Punishment", which was being published in parts in a magazine, had to make a forced pause. According to an enslaving contract with the publisher Stelovsky, in less than a month, by November 1, Dostoevsky was supposed to present him a short novel. Otherwise he would have been threatened with a 9-year loss of copyright on all newly created compositions. But Dostoevsky did not have anything to offer to his publisher, and there were only 26 days left until the end of the term.

He was advised to take a stenographer and try to write a new work with his help in a short time. So the best graduate of stenographers' courses, 20-year-old Anna Snitkina, came to Dostoevsky's apartment.

The new life-saving novel was to be "The Gambler". At night, Dostoevsky made sketches, during the day he dictated them to a stenographer, in the evening she put the notes in order, and in the morning Dostoevsky corrected the prepared sheets. "The Gambler" was written on time - on October 30, 1866, the novel was completed.

However, the publisher deliberately disappeared from St. Petersburg, preventing Dostoevsky from fulfilling the contract. And then Anna showed ingenuity - the manuscript was handed over on receipt to the bailiff of the police unit where Stellovsky lived, a few hours before the deadline.

3,5 months later Fyodor and Anna got married.

Dostoevsky did not know how to handle money, and Anna took control of the family's financial affairs in her own hands, protecting the writer from annoying creditors. She always treated her husband as a big, naive and simple-minded child (although he was a quarter of a century older than her), who had to be protected from all pressing problems.

Anna decided to deal with creditors herself. She agreed with them on a deferred payment and began to do what none of the Russian writers had ever done: to prepare the novel "Demons" for independent publication without the help of publishers. With her characteristic pedantry, Dostoevskaya figured out all the intricacies of the publishing business, and "Demons" sold out instantly, bringing a good profit. And since then, the writer's wife had been independently publishing all the works of her brilliant husband.

After the death of Fyodor Mikhailovich, Anna never married again. She outlived the writer by 37 years and dedicated all these years to his memory: only the complete works of the brilliant husband were published 7 times during her lifetime, and individual books even more. At the end of the 19th century, many years later, she set about transcribing the stenographic records of 1867, which, like their letters with her husband and Memoirs, were published after Dostoevskaya's death, since she herself considered their publication immodest. In memory of Fyodor Mikhailovich, she organized in Staraya Russa where the spouses had a dacha a school for poor peasant children.

Their marriage lasted only 14 years, but it was at this time that Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky wrote all his most famous and significant novels: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov. I would like to say a big thank to Anna Grigoryevna not only for being his muse inspiring the writer, but also for her work, which made Dostoevsky the most published Russian writer in the world.