Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already.
At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian named A.D. Harvey, and a bewildering variety of other names from letters pages and scholarly journals – Stephanie Harvey, John Schellenberger, Trevor McGovern, Leo Bellingham – that may or may not belong to him. The piece raises all sorts of questions. If you work for a magazine, however, it raises one question with particular urgency: did any of these people write to us?
Well, we’ve looked – or rather the indefatigable Jonathan Jones has – and the only one of Naiman’s names that crops up in our archives is that of Harvey himself.
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