Бедные люди

About this book

<p>In 1840s <abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg the ageing copyist Makar Dievushkin is, with various degrees of subtlety, trying to woo Barbara Dobroselova, a young woman who has had a swift fall in fortunes. Told in alternating letters to each other, their past stories and current hopes play out in raw and personal detail, as the daily realities of an uncaring and expensive town take hold.</p> <p><i>Poor Folk</i> was <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky">Fyodor Dostoevsky’s</a> first novel and was written to try and cover his escalating debts from his expensive lifestyle and gambling addiction. Luckily for Dostoevsky, it was an immediate success when it was published in the <i><abbr>St.</abbr> Petersburg Collection</i>, and the accolades from critics such as Belinsky and Herzen propelled him into the high echelons of Russian literary society. This edition is the 1915 translation by <abbr>C. J.</abbr> Hogarth.</p>

Themes & subjects

About the author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881

Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovitch Dostoyevsky was a journalist and short-story writer, whose psychological penetration into the human soul profoundly influenced the 20th century novel. Dostoevsky's novels have much autobiographical elements, but ultimately they deal with moral and philosophical questions. He presented interacting characters with contrasting views or ideas about freedom of choice, Socialism, atheisms, good and evil, happiness and so forth. Dostoevsky's central obsession was God, whom his characters constantly search through painful errors and humiliations. ([Source][1]) Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spirit…