Poor Folk
An ageing copying clerk in Petersburg spends wages he does not have on sweets, geraniums and letters to a young relative living across the courtyard. Their correspondence turns poverty into a question of shame rather than of statistics, and the clerk's reading of Gogol persuades him that literature has been laughing at men like himself. Dostoevsky's first published work, which Belinsky read in manuscript and announced as the arrival of a new Gogol.
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- responds to ↑ The Overcoat
- alludes to ↑ The Tales of Belkin
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- 63% · 14 shared
- 62% · 12 shared
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- 55% · 11 shared