Poor Folk

In a crowded, evil-smelling lodging house in St. Petersburg, an ageing copy-clerk named Makar Devushkin begins to write letters to a young woman across the courtyard. Varvara Dobroselova is a distant relation, orphaned and ailing, who sews to keep herself; Makar has spent thirty years copying documents for a pittance. They live close enough to wave from their windows, yet they conduct their whole relationship on paper — and the letters carry everything, from the price of boots to the cruelties of a landlady to the small gifts Makar ruins himself to give.

Out of these scraps a quiet tragedy gathers. Makar spends what he does not have and sinks deeper into want; Varvara, watching him fall on her account, is drawn toward a loveless marriage that will save her body and sever the one tie that has kept them both alive. Poor Folk was Dostoevsky’s first novel, written when he was twenty-four, and it made him famous in a night: the critic Belinsky hailed it as Russia’s first true social novel and its author as the heir of Gogol.

Tender, unsparing, and humane, it is the seedbed of everything Dostoevsky would later become — the first full statement of his great theme, the irreducible worth of the humblest human soul. Where Gogol’s little clerk was a figure of comedy, Dostoevsky’s has an inner life of pride, longing, and love, and the book insists that he be honoured for it.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by C. J. Hogarth, paired with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, meaning, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.