Poor Folk is Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel, an epistolary story of poverty, tenderness, and humiliation in Petersburg. Through letters between Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, Dostoevsky gives voice to people whose dignity is constantly threatened by money, illness, gossip, and dependence. The novel is intimate, sentimental, socially observant, and already alert to the psychology of suffering.
Poor Folk is important because it shows Fyodor Dostoevsky discovering the moral depth of marginal lives. Its form is simpler than his later masterpieces, but the concern with shame, compassion, social cruelty, and spiritual hunger is unmistakable. Readers interested in Russian realism, letters as narrative, urban poverty, emotional dependence, class injury, fragile hope, and Dostoevsky's beginnings will find an essential early work.
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