In the Library
Poor Folk
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1846
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 4 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by C. J. Hogarth
- Chapters
- Chapters 52
- Length
- Length 54k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
For you had understood what I wanted, you had understood what my heart was craving for.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Overcoat
Nikolai Gogol
The story every Russian writer came out of, and the one this book answers directly: Dostoevsky gives the humiliated clerk the inner life Gogol only let him have as a joke.
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The same city, the same airless rooms and the same terrible arithmetic of what poverty makes a person willing to consider, twenty years later and much darker.
Free in the app
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
Another short book about a small official whose life is judged by nobody except the reader, and which finds enormous feeling in an unremarkable man.
£1.99
About the book
Two windows face each other across a Petersburg courtyard, and the whole novel passes between them: a middle-aged copying clerk and a girl with no protector, writing letters neither can afford to send. He spends money he does not have on sweets and geraniums for her. He pretends he is not hungry. He is transparently, agonisingly in love, and he never once says so, because saying so would be a liberty. This was Dostoevsky's first book and it made him famous the week it appeared, because nobody had thought to give a clerk an inner life this large, or a prose this tender to hold it. What ruins you is the smallness of what he wants and how far out of reach it is: a decent coat, her good opinion, an evening when nothing bad happens. Everyone in Russian literature after this has read it, and you can hear it in all of them.