Poor Folk

Makar Devushkin is a middle-aged copying clerk who can barely afford his corner behind a kitchen partition, and Varvara Dobroselova is a young orphan living across the courtyard. They write to each other almost daily, and in their letters they share sweets, worries, borrowed books and small lies about how well they are managing. Makar spends money he does not have to keep her comfortable, while Varvara quietly watches her options run out.

This was Dostoevsky's first novel, published in 1846 when he was twenty-four, and its success was immediate: the critic Belinsky received it with enthusiasm, and literary Petersburg spoke of a new Gogol. It is gentler than his later books, but the dignity of poor people and the shame of being pitied are already his subjects. Read it beside White Nights for the early Dostoevsky.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.