Customer Reviews

Poor People

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Dostoevsky's graphic portrayal of the struggles of the poor is set in St. Petersburg, Russia around 1840. The two main characters are Makar Devushkin, a wretched, 40ish, impoverished scribe in the Tsar's civil service, and, Verenka Alexeyevna, an intelligent, sickly, orphaned teenager. In "Poor People" the desperate struggles of that the poor are psychological laid bare. They have no safety net, no patron to keep them from tumbling over the edge of despair.

Dostoevsky does not romanticize the poor. He shows their dysfunctional idiosyncracies: "Poor people are capricious - that's the way nature arranges it." Makar is an unreliable, self-deprecating, yet vain man. Throughout the story Dostoevsky makes Makar's boots an analogy of both Makar personality and his situation in life.

The young, vulnerable Verenka holds on to life by a thin thread. Her sacred memories of her beautiful childhood long gone sustain her. She carries these memories as one would carry a mystical crystal, tightly clutched to her heart. Her memories are her elixirs of life. These two protagonists, though embedded in the same poverty, go different ways. One is carried by the fickleness of fate, and the other makes a desperate choice for change.

I confess, to my chagrin, I have never read Dostoevsky. I was chided by a well-read friend, who, during a discussion about the world's greatest novelist, stated "You must read Dostoevsky because of his grasp of the human psyche. Dostoevsky's characters have profoundly influenced world literature." So, I chose to start with "Poor People"; it was Dostoevsky's first novel, and one of his shortest (130 pages, verses `The Brothers Karamazov' at 900+ pages).

If you're going to start reading Dostoevsky then `Poor People' is a great book to commence with. You will get a glimpse of Dostoevsky's unique insight into the nature of humankind and about the extremes of life. Highly Recommended.

What a beautiful and tragic work. I am a lifelong fan of Dostoevsky's work and this is no exception. While "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Puhishment" are his most noted achievements, and rightfully so, it is a wonder to me how much insight he had into the human condition at such an early age.

This work demonstrates his understanding of the human condition: our need for love and basic necessities of life. What are these basic needs? Respect, honor, love. But these are diminished in the face of abject poverty, which are lost when basic needs cannot be met. Despite human pride and an ability to work to provide home and hearth, it is not always possible to do so.

And so, in the midst of the squalor and dreariness of St. Petersberg, two souls are joined together, an aging man and a young woman, through a series of letters and brief innocent encounters . There is a deep reverence and joy in this relationship which can never be more than a desperate attempt to find warmth in the bleakest of conditions. And this is the beauty of the work. They sacrifice all they have to help each other, until at last, the final sacrifice cannot be made and their paths are determined once and for all.

For those that have read Dostoevsky's great works, do not miss this one. It is a true gem.

Fyodor Dostoevsky is a leading author in Russian literature.
A brilliant thinker, he was remarkable in his powers of character analysis and narrative technique.

POOR PEOPLE is Dostoevsky's first original novel. The story
is a painfully sincere account of poverty and its effects on the human psychic. It is profound!

Dag Stomberg
St. Andrews, Scotland

Dostoyevsky was a writer most in tuned to publics general needs and desires and how through life events they cope to achieve happiness or some sort compromise with misery or deeper despair. A typical city administrative clerk struggling through his 40's with love and employment. Falls in love with a sickly, young women with some personality. Together they fall in love and the clerk sells his everything to help her with needs for medicine and the like. We soon see that his dedication to her ends with her marrying a rich individual but at least thanking him for his help and generosity. This was Dostoyevsky's first novel and first critical success which made him an overnight sensation in St Petersburg and the rest of Russia. Soon at a party ater the novels release he gets up and states his opinion of the current Czarist administration. It leads to a trial and Dostoyevsky being found guilty of treason and is sentenced to death by a firing squad. He then is later led to a firing squad and has his blindfold placed and the squad is given the order to take sight of the individual. Then before saying "Fire" Dostoyevsky is informed that his death sentence by orders of the Czar is reprieved in favor of 10 years in a working prison in Siberia. The Czar later acknowledges his decision based on having read his novel Poor Folk and found it very promising so he spared his life. Once he serves his sentence he soon writes The House of the Dead, an almost autobiographical account of his experiences in prison. It is these these two works that made him my favorite author although I had not at that time even read his two sublime master works- Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. Read and thoroughly enjoy.