Poor Folk
Poor Folk, also translated as Poor People, was the first work of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and published in 1846.
Makar Alekséievich Dévushkin and Varvara Alekséievna Dobrosiólova are distant family and live in St. Petersburg. Varvara is affectionately called by Makar as Várenka. She is an orphan and when her father died, she went to live with a lady named Anna, who is especially cruel to her. There she dedicates herself to sewing with her partner Fedora. Makar is a state official.
Both send letters to each other on a regular basis. In them, they discuss society, their personal problems, work or the poverty of both. This low standard of living is the main theme of the novel.
Varvara is ill and her personal and economic situation is unsustainable, so she will have to take a radical turn in her life against her feelings...
This edition is based on the 1915 translation by C. J. Hogarth.
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Public domain (US)·No sign-up·DRM-free·Real text, not scans
Copyright note. Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky is believed to be in the public domain in the United States only. It may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you are not in the United States, please check your local laws to ensure this eBook is in the public domain in your country before downloading Poor Folk in PDF or EPUB.
- Pages
- 176
- Reading time
- 4 hours 46 minutes
- Pace
- Slow
- First published
- 1846
- Language
- Russian
- Downloads
- 5,393
180 years later, still timely
Why Read Poor Folk in 2026?
An exchange of letters maps the dignity and strain of poverty with piercing tenderness. Brief, intimate, and surprisingly contemporary about rent, work, and pride.
Today's connection
The epistolary form lets us feel how bureaucracy and scarcity shape a day—and how kindness survives anyway. It’s a concise starting point for Dostoevsky’s lifelong questions about responsibility and compassion.
Letters with consequences
Voice, context, and subtext do the work.
Society’s pressure
Rules and costs press on private hopes.
Respect for the vulnerable
Empathy grounded in detail, not sentiment.
These collections include Poor Folk
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About the author
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Psychological depth and moral crisis under pressure; fiction that tests conscience, freedom, and society.
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From Poor Folk
After all, one drinks tea largely to please one's fellow men, Barbara, and to give oneself tone and an air of gentility (though, of myself, I care little about such things, for I am not a man of the finicking sort).
There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.
And though I suffer for you, yet it eases my heart to suffer for you.
I don’t even know what I’m writing, I have no idea, I don’t know anything, and I’m not reading over it, and I’m not correcting my style, and I’m writing just for the sake of writing, just for the sake of writing more to you… My precious, my darling, my dearest!
I declined, as I say, to play cards, and was, therefore, requested to discourse on philosophy, after which no one spoke to me at all.