Poor Folk

Dostoevsky’s first published book tells its story entirely through letters passed between two poor relations living in shabby corners of St. Petersburg: the aging clerk Makar Devushkin and the young, ailing Varvara Dobroselova. Across their correspondence a tender, anxious devotion grows, even as illness, debt, and the small daily humiliations of poverty press in on them both. Written when Dostoevsky was in his early twenties and published in 1846, it won immediate praise from critics who saw a major new talent and a fresh compassion for society’s forgotten people. The seeds of his later concern with dignity and suffering are already here. This free PDF and EPUB edition presents C. J. Hogarth’s English translation in full.