Poor Folk (1846)

Poor People
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel is fairly called “epistolary”—it is a series of letters between two distant cousins in love with one another by all their many declarations. The approach brings some some awkwardness to the narrative related directly to the stop-and-reset nature of a series of letters. Epistolary novels were more common in 19th-century literature, but usually they involved correspondents who are monied people, middle class at least, with leisure time to write. Dostoevsky’s innovation here is to put the emphasis directly on “poor folk.” In terms of classifications, I’m less sure about “novel” because it’s pretty short, less than 150 pages by my count, whereas I see later work of his that appears to be longer characterized as “novella.” As always, go figure. Dostoevsky wrote Poor Folk in his mid-20s but it feels like mature work, perhaps because the epistolary nature of it may cover up to some extent his inexperience as a writer. Critics in the 1840s declared it a social novel—Russia’s first, according to some. The correspondents detail many lives of poverty, including their own, but their anecdotes are fragmented, not the point of their letters even if they are the point of the novel. Some story elements go unfinished or must be surmised. The main subject of these two is their love for one another. Other stories may be broken off but that one never is. There’s a large age gap between them too—he is close to 50 and she’s not even 20. Dostoevsky’s style, his voice, is already in evidence. I’m not sure how to describe it. He enters into passages that are like ranting, full of wild invective, justifications, and self-lacerations. Yet they are also concrete and vivid and serve to propel the stories. Even this early in his career he can sweep you up into them. The best example here is the longest letter by far, written by the woman (in my C.J. Hogarth translation she is Barbara, though more often elsewhere I see her called Varvara). She intends the letter to be the story of her life and it covers a lot of territory. Most of their concerns are otherwise about the daily inconveniences of poverty and how they attempt to overcome them. These persistent, ever-shifting daily problems will be familiar to anyone who has had periods of no money. The crises may seem trivial, especially to people of means, but they are constant and can be imposing. They can take a lot of time and energy to deal with. Despair is never far. The correspondents also make some connections over reading—both are literate. He works as a copyist. The ending is sad because a rich (and cruel) man proposes to Barbara and she accepts, leaving her cousin behind in grief. I don’t particularly like the epistolary mode much, but it’s interesting to encounter Dostoevsky so young and fresh. Call him DJ Dusty F.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.