Poor Folk and Other Stories (Penguin Classics)

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 consist 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 Dosteyevsky lifted a plot from a stranger-than-fiction newspaper story (about a poor man's hidden hoards) and transformed in into inspired and desolate comedy.