Poor Folk

I'm trying to quit spending so much time on the internet and I am finding Dostoevsky's "Poor Folk" to be a wonderful immersion with reading. This is the kind of book that you sit down to read in a big chair and take your time. Get a hot drink, preferably in a thermos style cup, and spend a couple of hours absorbing it. This isn't something that you can slam down-- I think it's best read in the winter time where life is a little bit slower. (I don't think I'll be able to read this in the summer.) This is a story of Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova who barely make it living paycheck to paycheck while struggling with debt and humiliation. One could easily say that this reflects contemporary issues regarding extreme wealth inequality, our gig economy, and the psychological effects of being "invisible" in a crowded, urban landscape. This is not the kind of book to read to escape the current news. I read it because I feel a connection to people who lived 100+ years ago the sadness of the human condition has recycled but really not changed much. Actually, it's really sad, but a book like this gives us insight to our own humanity.

Nothing fancy but it’s an inexpensive version of a compelling story

Writer .This is a good introduction to Dostoyevsky and you won't regret reading it.Why do Amazon insist you write a review?

I'm glad I finally got around to reading this novel, Dostoyevsky's first, written in haste to raise much needed money. My favorite author, if it really is possible to have one among so many giants, didn't let me down. Despite its being conceived as an exchange of letters between cousins, it has all the strengths of the later works - understatement, simplicity, sympathy for the human condition, humility. In short, another of the great Russian's many masterpieces.

Just as described, thanks!

The Dover Thrift Editions are good values. The typescript is neat and legible and the paper and binding seem sturdy.

What can I say - it's Dostoevsky!

Poor People was the first work published by Dostoyevsky. Around the time the book came out, he was still a somewhat idealistic youngster associated with the quasi-revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle. Along with the much-maligned Double, Poor People represents the entire body of work that Dostoyevsky completed and published before he was arrested, sentenced to death, reprieved, and sent to Siberia for 4 years. The man that returned from the frozen north was in fact a very different person, who had “found his soul” and embraced the slavophile lifestyle under the auspices of a nascent existential perspective that would go to influence many writers and philosophers of the 20th century. Poor People however still provides an important insight into the influences of young Dostoyevsky. Through the lives of Makar and Barbara you see how he viewed and sympathized with the downtrodden of the St. Petersburg lower middle class. Though written as an exchange of letters between the two lovers, you can easily relate to how someone like Makar can never rise above his station and how he must make genuine sacrifices to provide even the most basic support for Barbara. He describes just how precarious the situation of the unlanded aristocracy truly was in Tsarist Russia, when an entire family, like Barbara’s, was one bout of tuberculosis away from being utterly penniless. Though these are weighty questions, Dostoyevsky does not dwell on the political repercussions, rather he tries to appeal to the emotions of his readers, who can read for themselves how Makar turns to alcohol to numb the pain of his life and how Barbara has no choice but to accept the marriage of man she found unbearable when she first met him. This is how the system breaks down the lives of the poor and downtrodden inhabitants of St. Petersburg. It is more than just the crowded tenements that smell of rotting fishguts or the severe deprivations of not eating for days on end, it is the lack of hope in a state of being that is devoid of even the basic prospect of building a life and having a family. For me the novella also presents a tantalizing “what if” scenario. What if Dostoyevsky was not rounded up in the arrests of the members of the Petrashevsky Circle? What if he was allowed to proceed down the progressive path that he envisions as the salvation of the characters of Poor People. Would his writing have been as potent if it was pushing a liberal agenda instead of the philosophical/spiritual one that emerges from Crime and Punishment?…I guess we will never know.

Highly recommend this book but if you prefer a bigger text size it is probably not for you.

Honestly one of his greatest stories. It may be his first story, but it's in my top 10 and I have read all of his novels. Every one of them.

Thank you

book was great, very emotionaly moving. its a short read but be worned its the gateway drug to Dostoevsky.

Good book. Classic