A dear friend sent me the video link below yesterday with the humorous message that perhaps I could now not only write Volume Two of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, but begin taking pre-orders for it.

The problem is that an error—probably an inadvertent one—was made by Mr Masoud Farasati, a knowledgeable and well-known critic in the field of art and literature, on the programme Ketab Baz hosted by dear Soroush Sehat. A piece I wrote under the title “Six Scenes from the Life of Dostoevsky,” which had been available for about ten months on my YouTube channel and my other social pages, was read on the programme under the different title “Dostoevsky's Letters,” without any reference to the actual author. It was then analysed across four programmes as though it were the work of the celebrated Russian writer. It was subsequently published in the journal Form va Naqd in the same way, without naming the author and under the title “Dostoevsky's Letters.”

This might not in itself be especially important. Perhaps Mr Farasati believed, or had been told, that the letters had in fact been written by Dostoevsky.

If this was done knowingly—which I consider unlikely—it would be regrettable. Yet it would still not be entirely surprising, because intellectual property, apparently, is not yet treated as something especially worthy of respect in Iran.

What makes the matter important and worth raising, more than the omission of the writer's name, is the error by which these six scenes were presented as Dostoevsky's personal writings and letters, then unfortunately published in the same form in Form va Naqd. The internet is now full of websites repeating the same mistake. The implication is that the late Dostoevsky may soon acquire a new book in Iran that exists nowhere else in the world.

I believe this is worth correcting, because Dostoevsky is not the author of these letters. Even if the text reached the programme through another person, a simple internet search and a visit to my YouTube channel would have made it possible to identify the writer, so that at least if the error occurred on television it need not have been repeated in print.

Although the mistake has already spread widely, it is not too late to correct it. With time, however, it may lead to a lasting false attribution of these writings to Dostoevsky. Such events are not without precedent in our cultural space; many of us have probably heard the story of the letters Charlie Chaplin never wrote to his daughter Geraldine.

Aydin Areta

An explanation of why “Six Scenes from the Life of Dostoevsky” was written and how it was structured

Fyodor Dostoevsky may be regarded as a forefather of literary existentialism in the nineteenth century. Those familiar with my writing and work know that existentialism forms an important part of what I do, and my interest in the thought of this great writer can be understood within that context.

In “Six Scenes from the Life of Dostoevsky,” which I recorded in my own voice and published on my YouTube channel, my principal aim was to create a work that, within a short period of about twenty minutes, could simultaneously introduce a general interested audience to the writer's biography and decisive moments in his life, on the one hand, and to the main lines of Dostoevsky's philosophy and fundamental ideas, on the other. I chose a first-person narrative form in order to increase the expressive force and impact of the text.

A further important point is that I tried to choose all the narrated events from episodes that genuinely occurred and to which the celebrated Russian writer referred either in his writings or in his public remarks. Finally, in order to remain faithful to his thought, throughout the text I used free, conceptual translations of well-known aphorisms and memorable sayings attributed to Dostoevsky, so that I could bring the text as close as possible to the horizon of thought of this great existentialist writer.

The result of these premises was a text in six scenes, read in the writer's voice over approximately twenty minutes, whose content is an attempt to unite biography with the foundational ideas of a writer, philosopher and thinker who may be regarded as one of the singular stars in the history of world literature concerned with meaning.

You can watch episodes 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Ketab Baz concerning this matter at:
https://www.aparat.com/v/O7AQ1

The original file published on my YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWWS7CzcLtI