Poor Folk
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"Poor People" is an epistolar novel - that is, a fairy tale told as a series of letters between characters. And oh, what kind of characters are they! Makar Dyevushkin Aleksievich - a barely squeaky clerk; Varvara Dobroselova Alekseevna works as a tailor, and both face the daily humiliation that society imposes on the poor. These are people that no one respects, not even on their own. These are people who are too poor to marry under their own circumstances; The love between them is chaste and righteous, a love that brings some readers to tears. But neither is the modlin; Fyodor Dostoevsky has something profound to say about these people and about this situation. And he says it very well. When the book was first published, Belinsky, the leading Russian literary critic of the time, predicted that Dostoevsky would become a literary giant. It's not hard to see how he came to that conclusion, and in retrospect he was absolutely right.
