Poor Folk and Other Stories

It takes place in a world of office , lodging-house and seamstress's rooms and consists of an impoverished love affair in letters between a copy clerk and a young girl who lives opposite him. Of the other stories in this volume The Landlady portrays a dreamer hero, housed in dreams of art until he is forced to move from his lodgings; and Polzunkov is a sketch of a "voluntary buffoon." For Mr.Prokharchin Dostoyevsky lifted a plot from a stranger-than-fiction newspaper story ( about a poor man's hidden hoard's) and transformed it into inspired and desolate comedy.

Poor Folk was Dostoyevsky's first great triumph in fiction and the work that looks forward to the double-acts and obsessions of his later genius.

It takes place in a world of office , lodging-house and seamstress's rooms and consists of an impoverished love affair in letters between a copy clerk and a young girl who lives opposite him. Of the other stories in this volume The Landlady portrays a dreamer hero, housed in dreams of art until he is forced to move from his lodgings; and Polzunkov is a sketch of a "voluntary buffoon." For Mr.Prokharchin Dostoyevsky lifted a plot from a stranger-than-fiction newspaper story ( about a poor man's hidden hoard's) and transformed it into inspired and desolate comedy.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), one of nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest novelists, spent four years in a convict prison in Siberia, after which he was obliged to enlist in the army. In later years his penchant for gambling sent him deeply into debt. Most of his important works were written after 1864, including Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, all available from Penguin Classics.

David McDuff was educated at the University of Edinburgh and has translated a number of works for Penguin Classics, including Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

David McDuff was educated at the University of Edinburgh and has translated a number of works for Penguin Classics, including Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.