'I'm not an independent scholar. I'm a rejected scholar' ... Arnold (AD) Harvey at home in north London. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Arnold Harvey is waiting for me outside his flat overlooking Clissold Park in north London. With beard, lank grey hair and a large stomach that may be the product of eating too many fry-ups at the greasy spoon next door, he looks like a bucolic version of William Golding. It is his first ever interview and he is nervous, expectant. After a lifetime of what he believes to be academic condescension – or worse, conspiracy – he sees me as a possible source of redemption. This could be tricky.
Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater's biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later.
It was only after a New York Times review of Tomalin's book that American specialists in Russian literature started to wonder about this meeting, Dostoevsky's account of which, according to Stephanie Harvey, had been documented in the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi (News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). "In what language did Dickens and Dostoevsky converse?" asked Russian scholars. Why had Dostoevsky's revealing portrait of Dickens – "There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite" – not been included in his collected works? And why had they never previously come across the distinguished journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi?
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Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater's biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later.
It was only after a New York Times review of Tomalin's book that American specialists in Russian literature started to wonder about this meeting, Dostoevsky's account of which, according to Stephanie Harvey, had been documented in the journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi (News of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic). "In what language did Dickens and Dostoevsky converse?" asked Russian scholars. Why had Dostoevsky's revealing portrait of Dickens – "There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite" – not been included in his collected works? And why had they never previously come across the distinguished journal Vedomosti Akademii Nauk Kazakskoi?
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