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    Poor Folk
    Poor Folk
    Poor Folk
    Ebook176 pages4 hours

    Poor Folk

    By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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    "Poor Folk", one of Dostoyevsky's greatest narratives is the story of two lower class people who fall in love. However, because of their extreme poverty they are too poor to even marry. Dostoyevsky's "Poor Folk" is an epistolary novel, or one told through a series of letters between the characters. It is gripping in its portrayal of the suffering, humiliation, and isolation that the poorest members of any society are forced to endure. A triumph of Russian literature, "Poor Folk" is a shining example of Dostoyevsky's narrative genius and its relative brevity makes it one of the author's more accessible works.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781420935431
    Author

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist and philosopher whose works examined the human psyche of the nineteenth century. Dostoyevsky is considered one of the greatest writers in world literature, with titles such as Crime and Punishment; Notes from Underground, one of the first existential novellas ever written; and Poor Folk, Russia’s first “social novel.”

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      Book preview

      Poor Folk - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

      POOR FOLK

      BY FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

      TRANSLATED BY C. J. HOGARTH

      A Digireads.com Book

      Digireads.com Publishing

      Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-2677-4

      Ebook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-3543-1

      This edition copyright © 2011

      Please visit www.digireads.com

      CONTENTS

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      POOR FOLK

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

      Fyodor Dostoyevsky is among the most famous of Russian authors. Novels such as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are taught today in high schools and universities around the world. Dostoyevsky is considered not just a writer of fiction, but a philosopher; not just a teller of stories, but an intellectual giant with keen insight into human psychology, spiritual crisis, despair and redemption—in short, all the factors that are usually included when discussing the human condition. His literary career spanned almost forty years. His entire life, both before and after publication, featured quiet devastations and life-altering events that would mold him into the distinctive voice of the late 19th century, not just in Russia, but anywhere in the world that his books are read.

      Dostoyevsky was born October 30, 1821, in the city of Moscow, the cultural and intellectual hub of Russia. Dostoyevsky’s mother was a gentle, though passing force in his life. She was devoutly religious and devoted to her children, but she would not live long enough to assuage the difficulties of life for her children, and even while she was living, she was no match for the dominating force of her husband. She died while Dostoyevsky was still a teenager, leaving him with his six siblings and an abusive father. His childhood years were spent reading the works of those writers that would have a profound effect on his writing in the future—Alexander Pushkin, Honore de Balzac, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Nikolai Gogol. Even with the escape of reading, the tense and unhappy home environment had an impact on Dostoyevsky in his adult years. The murder of his father at the hands of a group of serfs that worked the Dostoyevsky land was even more affecting. His guilt over the tragedy appears subtly and frequently in his fiction in one form or another, most obviously in the case of The Brothers Karamazov, in which a father is murdered by his son.

      At the time of his father’s death, Dostoyevsky was away from home pursuing a degree in engineering at the St. Petersburg University on his father’s orders. His time there was in many ways as miserable as his time at home. Whereas his father was the dictator of his childhood, rigorous schoolwork that he had neither an interest in nor aptitude for, became the tyrant of his years as a student.

      Upon graduation from engineering school, Dostoyevsky almost immediately turned to a career in literature. Without his father around, there was no one to argue against it, and he believed he did not have a real future as an engineer. His first works were translations that received some small attention. He quickly began writing fiction of his own, but not before an incident occurred that profoundly influenced his approach to writing and to life in general.

      As he was just beginning to submerge himself into his writing and the political, intellectual, and cultural zeitgeist of his time and place, Dostoyevsky became involved with Mikhail Petrashevsky and his Petrashevsky Circle. Politics and literature were the principal topics of the group’s meetings, and with current legislation declaring these types of groups illegal, the members of the small band were soon arrested and scheduled for execution by firing squad. Just as they were about to be gunned down, they were saved by a last minute decree from the Czar commuting their sentences to confinement at a Siberian labor camp. In many ways, all of Dostoyevsky’s canon is an exploration of that single point in time—standing across from death, dumbly, absurdly, and without a choice in the matter, then having the whole ordeal end in a second. Every character Dostoyevsky wrote faced this same absurdity and despair. Even when getting out of bed on a regular and mundane morning, a character was facing the firing squad.

      It wasn’t until 1854 that Dostoyevsky was permitted to leave the labor camp. Even then, the government put Dostoyevsky into a Siberian army uniform and he served in the army for five more years. While serving in the Siberian army, Dostoyevsky met and married Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva. In 1859 he was allowed back into the regular world once again. After only a few years of marriage, Maria died. Dostoyevsky was remarried to Anna Grigorevna Snitkina. With Anna, he had four children: Lyubov, Aleksei, Fyodor, and Sofia. Upon arriving home from Siberia and settling down after his first wife’s death, Dostoyevsky immersed himself in his writing, producing some of the works he is best known for today. The novel that is considered to be his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, was completed shortly before he died on January 29, 1881.

      The single most common mark of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel is psychology—both man’s psychology in and of itself and the shaping force of psychology in man’s life. This emerges from Dostoyevsky’s own psychological suffering throughout his life. His time in prison, his moment before the firing squad, and his years serving in the Siberian army—these were not simply punishments. They were psychological weapons that tore him down in the most complete way possible, starting with the psyche. The years of uncertainty and always being on the edge of death were too much for him. While in prison, he began having epileptic seizures that would continue to plague him for the rest of his life. Upon finally being released back into normal life, he was never able to let go of the psychological trauma, and it was worsened to an extent by the burden of debt at times. Almost all of his characters suffer this kind of psychological torment, and even his characters that are at odds with the law, are really at odds with their own minds.

      Given the hardship and uncertainty of Dostoyevsky’s life, it should come as no surprise that his work is often grouped in with such writers as Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. All of these figures were associated with the existential movement, whether they intended it or not. Existentialism is not easy to define, but its most prominent characteristic is questioning the purpose of life. This question is posed in different ways by different authors.

      Kafka chose to explore whether or not man is paralyzed and powerless in a society controlled and manipulated by an overarching state government. This issue comes up in a number of his works, but most prominently and obviously in The Trial. He asks if there really is such a thing as freedom, if there is such a thing as the individual, and if trying to fight for freedom and individuality in a society that promotes conformity is pointless or worthwhile.

      Jean-Paul Sartre wrote plays, novels, and philosophical treatises in which he questions whether or not man as an individual has any real authenticity outside of the life experiences and forces that shape him. He had other concerns that were more obscure and tedious to follow in his writing, but from an existential standpoint, individual authenticity was his preoccupation. The work he is probably best known for is Being and Nothingness.

      Another philosopher that had a strong influence on the existential arena in which Dostoyevsky wrote was Friedrich Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche is typically deemed a nihilist, especially in works like Thus Spake Zarathustra, the paradigm he created for modern humanity, the Superman, was a creative, existential insistence on man’s ability to control and create his own individual existence free from the help of a distant God that may or may not even care--or be there at all.

      Aside from Dostoyevsky, the most famous existentialist of 20th century literature is Albert Camus. Camus was a French philosopher who wrote such fiction as The Fall, The Plague, and his most famous and lasting work, The Stranger. He also wrote numerous nonfiction essays further outlining the philosophy that he advances in his fiction. Camus was concerned with the overwhelming vein of absurdity running through human life in the absence of a God. His principal exploration of the absurd was in terms of suicide—whether or not there is any point or value in killing oneself in an absurd universe.

      Into this world of darkness and ambiguity comes Fyodor Dostoyevsky. His concern was the truth of the human condition, and he addressed this concern in all of his works, stories and novels alike. No other work written by him reflects his standing as an existential author quite like Notes from Underground.

      Although several novels and stories preceded Notes from Underground, it wasn’t until the publication of this novel that Dostoyevsky really came to fame. The novel features a nameless main character recounting life events and the state of contemporary society as he sees it. He is a self-proclaimed bitter man, with nothing but insolence and disdain for modern man. There is less of a plot at work here than there is in Crime and Punishment, but this doesn’t diminish the work in any way. In fact, because plot is of less importance, the novel becomes strictly a vehicle for conveying Dostoyevsky’s philosophical beliefs in light of a turbulent life experience. The author here turns a spotlight to the reality of human misery, despair, and hopelessness; to the paradoxical quandary that arises when one flees the absurdity of harsh reality and human company only to find any hiding place, any hole such as the one the narrator preaches from, just as much a den of the absurd as any other place.

      Misery isn’t particular—it is everywhere and all-present, whether one tries to alienate himself from society or not. These are the driving concerns of Notes from Underground. They are not meant to be happy. They are not meant to answer existential questions satisfactorily, but rather to pose them. In offering such questions up to the reader, Dostoyevsky doesn’t intend to suggest the narrator is justified and correct in his cynicism and misery; he merely seems to point out that at least considering despair as a sane option to a harsh world is as healthy as any other option. On a timeline, the drafting of this novel would fall somewhere between Dostoyevsky’s firing squad sentence and his pardon and orders to Siberia. He had not yet faced his executioners, but mentally and emotionally he might as well have already been there. All in all, Notes from Underground is the first clear introduction to Dostoyevsky the existentialist.

      Two years following the publication of Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky put out Crime and Punishment. The Brothers Karamazov was then published in 1880, completing the three works Dostoyevsky was and still is most well known for. Both later novels select crime as the central conflict and use it as a means of generating thematic issues that follow logically from the initial existential conundrums set forth in Notes from Underground. The Crime and Punishment plot follows the pathless and self-doubting Raskolnikov, who has unwittingly decided to commit a crime he himself is not yet aware of. The themes that arise here focus on good and evil as arbitrary or meaningful labels, the spiritual and physical alienation of man from his fellow man and the implications inherent in that alienation, and the psychology of the criminal as sane to the degree that an absurd world warrants absurd actions.

      The Brothers Karamazov tells the story of four brothers and their cold, unloving father. The father is murdered by one of his four children, each of which very well could be responsible. Some of the themes at work in Crime and Punishment are also evident in this novel, including the scope of free will and the paradox of a loving God who allows his people to suffer.

      In addition to these three novels, Dostoyevsky wrote twelve other novels and numerous short stories. A few of the more well-known lesser novels are The Idiot, The Gambler, Demons, The Double, and The House of the Dead. Throughout his literary career, Fyodor Dostoyevsky honed a voice that was all his own, a voice that boldly pointed out the shortcomings of human existence and the misery inherent in everyday life. Ultimately, unlike most of the existential writers he is grouped with, Dostoyevsky did not abandon his faith in God. He did not tell his readers that it was right or good to sink into despair and turn away from God. Neither did he condone accepting conditions as they were. Rather, in his narratives he posed the questions that logically plague humans on a daily basis, the questions they may at times feel ashamed of asking, even if only to themselves. For Dostoyevsky, man can be viewed as existing on a separate plane from God—and there arises the chaos, the despair, and the absurdity that permeates everyday life. He suggests that there is somewhere a logical, ordered universe where everything makes sense, but while alive on Earth, man has every right to recognize the skewed condition that springs from his separation from God.

      POOR FOLK

      April 8th. MY DEAREST BARBARA ALEXIEVNA,—How happy I was last night—how immeasurably, how impossibly happy! That was because for once in your life you had relented so far as to obey my wishes. At about eight o'clock I awoke from sleep (you know, my beloved one, that I always like to sleep for a short hour after my work is done)—I awoke, I say, and, lighting a candle, prepared my paper to write, and trimmed my pen. Then suddenly, for some reason or another, I raised my eyes—and felt my very heart leap within me! For you had understood what I wanted, you had understood what my heart was craving for. Yes, I perceived that a corner of the curtain in your window had been looped up and fastened to the cornice as I had suggested should be done; and it seemed to me that your dear face was glimmering at the window, and that you were looking at me from out of the darkness of your room, and that you were thinking of me. Yet how vexed I felt that I could not distinguish your sweet face clearly! For there was a time when you and I could see one another without any difficulty at all. Ah me, but old age is not always a blessing, my beloved one! At this very moment everything is standing awry to my eyes, for a man needs only to work late overnight in his writing of something or other for, in the morning, his eyes to be red, and the tears to be gushing from them in a way that makes him ashamed to be seen before strangers. However, I was able to picture to myself your beaming smile, my angel—your kind, bright smile; and in my heart there lurked just such a feeling as on the occasion when I first kissed you, my little Barbara. Do you remember that, my darling? Yet somehow you seemed to be threatening me with your tiny finger. Was it so, little wanton? You must write and tell me about it in your next letter.

      But what think you of the plan of the curtain, Barbara? It is a charming one, is it not? No matter whether I be at work, or about to retire to rest, or just awaking from sleep, it enables me to know that you are thinking of me, and remembering me—that you are both well and happy. Then when you lower the curtain, it means that it is time that I, Makar Alexievitch, should go to bed; and when again you raise the curtain, it means that you are saying to me, Good morning, and asking me how I am, and whether I have slept well. As for myself, adds the curtain, I am altogether in good health and spirits, glory be to God! Yes, my heart's delight, you see how easy a plan it was to devise, and how much writing it will save us! It is a clever plan, is it not? And it was my own invention, too! Am I not cunning in such matters, Barbara Alexievna?

      Well, next let me tell you, dearest, that last night I slept better and more soundly than I had ever hoped to do, and that I am the more delighted at the fact in that, as you know, I had just settled into a new lodging—a circumstance only too apt to keep one from sleeping! This morning, too, I arose (joyous and full of love) at cockcrow. How good seemed everything at that hour, my darling! When I opened my window I could see the sun shining, and hear the birds singing, and smell the air laden with scents of spring. In short, all nature was awaking

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