Poor Folk

6 hrs. 3 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrators Anna Kamenkova, Efim Shifrin

Narrator Anna Kamenkova

Narrator Efim Shifrin

Description

Fyodor Dostoevsky blew up the genre of the psychological novel, setting an unsurpassably high bar of mastery and influencing many famous writers and philosophers of the 20th century, from Orwell and Sartre to Nietzsche and Freud. And today his novels help people around the world know themselves and serve as a gateway into the endless complexity of the human soul. “Poor Folk” is Dostoevsky’s first novel, which he began creating at the age of 23, after resigning from military service and deciding to devote himself fully to literature. All the motives that would later unfold in his classic, most famous works are compressed here into a tightly wound spring. This is a novel in letters: they write to each other—Makár Devushkin, a middle-aged titular councillor, and Varenka, a young impoverished noble orphan. The brilliant acting duo of Yefim Shifrin and Anna Kamenkova expertly guides the listener through a psychologically nuanced drama of two people, each trying to preserve their soul amid the hardships of poverty. Only one of them succeeds—at the cost of a broken heart.

“Poor Folk” is an endlessly relevant novel about each of us, regardless of which century we live in.