Crocodiles in St. Petersburg’s Passage Department Store in 1864: Towards the history of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Crocodile and Something Personal

Abstract

The article newly presents archival materials from the Directorate of Imperial Theaters relative to the organization of a crocodile exhibition held in St. Petersburg Passage department store in the autumn of 1864, along with newspaper reports on the event. The close analysis of specific articles demonstrates that this exhibition served as the direct inspiration and source for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story The Crocodile, published in early 1865 in his journal The Epoch. This discovery provides insights into the timeline of Dostoevsky’s work on the story and prompts a reexamination of the reason why he later misrepresented this chronology in the note Something Personal. This article proposes that Dostoevsky sought to deny publicly the rumors that he had mocked Nikolay Chernyshevsky in The Crocodile. The writer intentionally manipulated temporal markers to suggest that the idea of the story appeared prior to Chernyshevsky’s sentencing and exile to hard labor. One can make a suggestion that, in the 1870s, Dostoevsky had to sort out this problem in order to make peace with Nikolay Nekrasov and to be able to publish in Otechestvennye Zapiski.

DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2026.1.07