Poor Folk

Poor Folk is told entirely in letters. Makar Devushkin, an ageing, low-ranking clerk in St Petersburg, and Varvara Dobroselova, a young woman who lives nearby, write to each other almost every day — about rent, worn-out boots, small kindnesses and the thin line between pride and humiliation.

It was Dostoevsky's first novel, written in his early twenties, and it made him famous in a single winter. Its close, quiet attention to ordinary people crushed by poverty owes a debt to Gogol — and announces what would become his lifelong subject: the dignity of the people the world overlooks.