穷人

On a Petersburg winter night, two windows face each other across a filthy courtyard. One glows with the candlelight of the copying clerk Makar Devushkin. The other holds the silhouette of Varvara Dobroselova, a poor young relation of his. The two of them almost never actually meet. Everything passes between them on paper, carried across the courtyard by an errand boy.

In 1846, a Dostoevsky still in his twenties handed in his first work and set Russian literary circles talking. The critic Belinsky finished it and declared that a new Gogol had arrived. Here, in its earliest form, is a theme Dostoevsky would spend his whole career returning to: the insulted and the injured. It is also his direct answer to Gogol's The Overcoat — except he trades the mocked overcoat for a letter that can never be sent again.

Makar Devushkin is forty-seven, a Titular Councillor of the ninth rank, the lowest kind of copying clerk in Petersburg, renting a corner behind a partition in a shared kitchen. Varvara Dobroselova is a poor young relation of his, orphaned early and living by her needlework. He is humble, sentimental, proud almost to the point of stubbornness. She is guarded, quick-witted, worn by life into a composure beyond her years.

They are not lovers — from beginning to end, neither of them ever names the bond between them. But the attachment is real, restrained and aching, and it exists only on paper. The act of writing is how each holds up a decent self for the other to see. That is the whole drama of the book: two people, a courtyard apart, falling carefully in love letter by letter.

When Varvara sends Makar the diary she kept as a girl, she is handing over her whole history. Orphaned young, she was taken in by a distant relation, Anna Fyodorovna, a shrewd widow, and in that household she fell in love with young Pokrovsky, a poor tutor and university student dying of consumption. That first love came to nothing.

Prompt

The most wrenching page in the diary is the day young Pokrovsky is buried. His father — a drunken, penniless old clerk — runs after the hearse, and the old books clutched in his arms spill out one by one as he goes. He never recovers from his son's death. It is the most famous image in the whole book: a father chasing a coffin, pages scattering across the snow.

Makar has almost nothing, but he splits what little he earns in two. Half goes on tea, a scarf, a new pair of boots, sent across the courtyard by the errand boy to give Varvara's life a little more dignity. What is left for himself is a uniform that grows shabbier by the month, and a head he can hold up less and less at the office.

He does not complain. He writes to Varvara that everything is fine. This is how he holds on to his dignity: whatever life grinds him down to, in his letters, at least, he is a respectable man.

Makar reads seriously. When he comes to Gogol's The Overcoat, his face changes — the mocked, penniless little clerk in the story is unmistakably him. He feels stripped bare.

But when he opens Pushkin's The Stationmaster — another humble old man ground down by fate — he weeps. Pushkin gives him dignity; Gogol gives him a wound. The same poor man, facing two great Russian predecessors: one takes aim at him, the other speaks for him. Through Makar, Dostoevsky is putting Russian literature's whole tradition of the little man on trial.

Enter the wealthy Mr. Bykov, an aging landowner and widower. Years earlier, it was he who got close to Varvara in Anna Fyodorovna's household and, in doing so, damaged her reputation. Now, wanting to clean up his own scandal and find himself an heir, he offers Varvara a marriage contract. This is not romance. It is a transaction.

Prompt

Varvara understands exactly what this means. She is well-born, intelligent, sensitive — and she has to bow to the need to survive. She accepts.

Varvara's letters start to fill with talk of a dowry, of packing, of arrangements for the journey ahead, the tone growing more formal, more distant by the letter. Makar's letters, by contrast, grow longer and more urgent, carrying something between the lines he cannot quite admit to himself, something close to pleading. He is still sending tea, still inventing reasons to knock on that window, but the young woman across the courtyard is fading, little by little, out of the world he writes.

Varvara leaves Petersburg with Bykov. Makar stays behind and writes one last letter, a letter that will never be answered. There is no reunion, no wedding of his own, only a man who goes on renting his corner behind the kitchen partition, still looking across the now-empty courtyard at a window that has gone dark.

Prompt

Dostoevsky was twenty-four when this debut made him famous overnight. It takes the sentimental epistolary novel and turns it into a quiet dissection of Petersburg's lowest rungs, almost without external drama: every joy and grief happens inside the lines of a letter. It is a quiet book, but the restraint itself is the force.

Prompt

What rewards rereading most is watching the word dignity get squeezed down to almost nothing, and still find room to expand. The more humble Makar becomes, the more stubbornly he insists on his own decency as a human being. This is the theme Dostoevsky would return to again and again, in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and its earliest form is hiding inside this slim novel in letters.

Prompt

A companion guide gives you a map, but you still miss the feel of the ground itself: the cold of Petersburg rain and snow against the windowpane, the careful way Makar packs his dignity into the lines of a letter, the warmth of Varvara's girlhood in her diary against the chill of the woman she becomes. None of that comes through until you open the book itself and watch the letters unfold, one after another.