Poor Folk and Other Stories
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Authors: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
POOR FOLK AND OTHER STORIES
FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY
was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician's seven children. His mother died in 1837 and his father was murdered a little over two years later. When he left his private boarding school in Moscow he studied from 1838 to 1843 at the Military Engineering College in St Petersburg, graduating with officer's rank. His first story to be published, âPoor Folk' (1846), was a great success. In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the âPetrashevsky circle'; he was reprieved at the last moment but sentenced to penal servitude, and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison at Omsk, Siberia. In the decade following his return from exile he wrote
The Village of Stepanchikovo
(1859) and
The House of the Dead
(1860). Whereas the latter draws heavily on his experiences in prison, the former inhabits a completely different world, shot through with comedy and satire. In 1861 he began the review
Vremya
(
Time
) with his brother; in 1862 and 1863 he went abroad, where he strengthened his anti-European outlook, met Mlle Suslova, who was the model for many of his heroines, and gave way to his passion for gambling. In the following years he fell deeply in debt, but in 1867 he married Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (his second wife), who helped to rescue him from his financial morass. They lived abroad for four years, then in 1873 he was invited to edit
Grazhdanin (The Citizen
), to which he contributed his
Diary of a Writer.
From 1876 the latter was issued separately and had a large circulation. In 1880 he delivered his famous address at the unveiling of Pushkin's memorial in Moscow; he died six months later in 1881. Most of his important works were written after 1864:
Notes from Underground
(1864),
Crime and Punishment
(1865-6),
The Gambler
(1866),
The idiot
(1869),
The Devils
(1871) and
The Brothers Karamazov
(1880).
DAVID MCDUFF
was born in 1945 and was educated at the University of Edinburgh. His publications comprise a large number of translations of foreign verse and prose, including poems by Joseph Brodsky and Tomas Venclova, as well as contemporary Scandinavian work;
Selected Poems
of Osip Mandelstam;
Complete Poems
of Edith Södergran; and
No I'm Not Afraid
, the selected poems of Irina Ratushinskaya. His first book of verse,
Words in
Nature
, appeared in 1972. He has translated a number of nineteenth-century Russian prose works for the Penguin Classics series. These include Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The House of the Dead, Poor Folk and Other Stories
and
Uncle's Dream and Other Stories
, Tolstoy's
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
and
The Sebastopol Sketches
, and Nikolai Leskov's
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.
He has also translated Babel's
Collected Stories
and Bely's
Petersburg
for Penguin.
FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY
TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY
D
AVID
M
C
D
UFF
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published 1988
18
Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright © David Mc Duff, 1988
All rights reserved
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EISBN: 978â0â141â90782â6
Dostoyevsky began his literary career as a translator of French fiction and the author of some plays inspired by his reading of Schiller. As an army sublieutenant in his early twenties attempting to finance a somewhat extravagant lifestyle on a budget consisting of his army salary and the not inconsiderable allowance he received from Karepin, the trustee of his father's estate, of 5,000 paper rubles per annum (a paper ruble was roughly equivalent in value to one third of a silver ruble), he turned increasingly to literary activity in the hope of combining his recently acquired idealistic philosophical convictions with his desire for fame and fortune. Of the plays, we know only that he wrote a pair of dramas, begun around 1841, entitled
Maria Stuart
and
Boris Godunov
, and a âShakespearean' play modelled on
The Merchant of Venice
called
The Jew Yankel
â the titles are all that has survived of them. We have rather more information about his activity as a translator. Like the theatre, French novels were extremely popular in the St Petersburg of the 1830s and 40s. The writings of Balzac, Sue and Hugo exercised a huge fascination on the Russian educated reading public. When Balzac visited St Petersburg for three months in 1843 he was greeted with universal acclaim as a literary hero. One of Dostoyevsky's early major translation projects was a complete Russian version of Balzac's novel
Eugénie Grandet.
Dostoyevsky's biographer Konstantin Mochulsky writes of this:
the translator intensified the emotional tone of the novel and did not hesitate
to employ effective similes and picturesque epithets. Under his pen the story of Eugénie's sufferings is transformed into a tale of'the unfathomable and horrifying tortures' of a poor young girl whose image for some reason or other he compares with an ancient Greek statue. This first literary attempt, after the editors had abridged it by a third, appeared in
Repertoire and Pantheon.
*
Balzac's influence on Dostoyevsky was profound and far-reaching. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that, without it, he might never have developed his creative talent in the direction he ultimately chose. In the character of Pére Goriot, for example, Dostoyevsky found the antecedent for a whole range of his own âinsulted and injured' civil servants, while Rastignac is in many senses a forerunner of Raskolnikov. It was while he was working on his translation of
Eugénie Grandet
that Dostoyevksy conceived the idea for a novel of his own, of roughly the same length. In reply to his brother Mikhail, who was urging him to consider a career in the theatre as a playwright, and with whom he was planning a translation of Schiller's plays, he objected that he needed money right away, and the rehearsal and performance of plays took time. âI have a hope,' he wrote to Mikhail on 30 September 1844.
I am finishing a
novel
of the same dimensions as
Eugénie Grandet.
It's rather an original piece of work. I'm at present copying it out, and I shall probably have had a reply concerning it by the 14th. I'm going to send it to
Notes of the Fatherland.
(I'm satisfied with my work.) I may get 400 rubles for it, and therein lie all my hopes.
The first draft of the novel,
Poor Folk
, was completed in November 1844. Three major revisions followed â one in December of that year, and two more in February and April 1845. This work of polishing, revising and rewriting seems to have possessed an almost religious significance and urgency for the writer. âAnd now, on the subject of bread and butter!' he wrote to Mikhail on 24 March.
You know, brother, that as far as that is concerned I depend upon my own strength. But whatever may happen, I have vowed to myself that even though doing so may kill me, I will remain firm and refuse to write to order. Writing to order crushes and ruins everything. I want each of my works to be distinctly good. Look at Pushkin, at Gogol. Neither of them wrote a great deal, yet they are both awaiting monuments. And now Gogol commands 1,000 silver rubles per printed sheet, while Pushkin, as you know,
was able to sell one of his poems for a gold sovereign. But their fame, particularly that of Gogol, was bought with years of poverty and hunger⦠Raphael painted for years, polishing his work and licking it into shape, and the result was a miracle: gods were created by his hand. Vernet takes a month to complete a pictureâ¦
This invocation of great names is significant: in his dissatisfaction with the form of his novel Dostoyevsky is expressing what he consciously perceives to be the discontent of a truly great artist, one who will rise above the crowd of common âfeuilletonists' and survive into posterity. Here, too, we can detect the vanity and incipient megalomania which was to cause him such trouble later on. The âhopes' of which he wrote to Mikhail were powerful ones indeed, compounded of immense personal ambition and a struggle against a poverty that was, to some extent at least, self-imposed, and came to assume a life-or-death quality. Later in the same letter we read:
I am seriously pleased with my novel. It is a strict and shapely work. There are, however, terrible defects⦠The time is near when I have promised to be with you, dear friends. But I shall not have the means to do that â the money, in other words⦠I hope to save the whole situation by my novel. If my project does not succeed, I may hang myself.
And further on:
In a feuilleton published in
The Invalid
I have just finished reading about the German poets who have died of hunger and cold, and in madhouses. There have been twenty of them so far, and what names! It all still fills me with terrorâ¦
