Poor Folk: How Dostoevsky Builds a Life in Letters

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler note: This essay discusses Poor Folk in full, including its ending.

Makar Devushkin supplies both sides of a conversation with a curtain. Lowered, it tells him to go to bed; raised, it wishes him good morning and assures him that the woman behind it is well. He congratulates himself on an invention that will save a great deal of writing, then sends her nearly two sheets of paper and begs for the fullest possible reply.

The woman is Varvara Dobroselova, his young, impoverished distant relative, living across a Petersburg courtyard. Makar is an older clerk who spends more than he can afford on her care. Their letters make up Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk, and the curtain’s eloquence lasts until her first answer: she had moved her flowerpots, and the fabric had caught up by accident.

There is room for her in this conversation precisely because she can spoil his version of it. She can also take up his invention. By the end of her letter she has deliberately looped the curtain and tells him to get some sleep. The imagined exchange has acquired a second participant, who corrects the story and then chooses to join it.

The life a reply makes possible

We learn how to read Makar by having Varvara read him first. He describes his cramped lodging behind a kitchen partition as a comfortable arrangement; she asks why someone who needs quiet has taken a room with so little of it. He minimizes the expense of his presents; she notices the necessities he must be going without. The second letter changes the evidence of the first without taking away its tenderness.

That adjustment is one of the pleasures of the book’s form. No supervising narrator has to step between the correspondents and announce the clerk’s self-deception. His assurances remain on the page, followed by an answer that knows what they leave out. Varvara’s own movement from rebuking the gifts to admiring the flowers preserves the pleasure and trouble of being cared for by someone who cannot afford it.

The courtyard makes this dependence on writing seem faintly absurd: why send so many letters to someone whose window you can see? Varvara repeatedly asks him to visit. In May, Makar explains that he scarcely left her side during her illness, then stopped visiting when people began noticing and asking questions. The bright nights deny him even the cover of darkness. Physical nearness exposes them to gossip, while letters let them continue the daily attention that a visit might make conspicuous.

Their shared life consists partly of these small provisions: an account of a neighbor, news of illness, money sent and returned, a request for a book. Each answer gives the next letter something to take up. The habit also leaves room for a refusal. In June, Varvara encloses a memoir Makar has asked to read, then later declines to continue it because remembering hurts too much.

For a long stretch, the familiar exchange opens into her earlier life: the countryside she left, her family’s decline, her affection for the young tutor Pokrovsky and the grief at his death. We inhabit a past in which Makar’s present solicitude cannot be the measure of everything. By giving Varvara this sustained narrative, Dostoevsky establishes how much of her life she must choose whether to make available to her correspondent. Her refusal to finish it is a limit he has to receive along with the gift.

The note read aloud

The privacy of the exchange is precarious. In August, at the rooms of Ratazyayev, a literary acquaintance, Makar inadvertently pulls a note to Varvara from his pocket. One of the company reads it aloud. The others laugh and turn the clerk’s attachment into a sexual joke.

Dostoevsky lets this reading reach us through another letter to Varvara. Makar tries to tell the person who understands the relationship what has happened when outsiders read it. His account rushes from their laughter to a servant’s refusal to run an errand, then to the insults they exchange. Public ridicule and unpaid debt crowd into the same report; he can no longer keep the private page apart from the demands and insults of the lodging house.

The pressure of a particular listener is familiar from Dostoevsky’s spoken exchanges. Here it follows the writing beyond its intended reader. Varvara could question Makar’s claims while remaining concerned about the man making them. The intimate note has supplied the company with a humiliating part for him to play, and he returns to Varvara in writing to contest it.

Varvara has burned her hand while working and sends almost her last coins. Soon she rebukes his drinking and his consuming anxiety about his reputation, explaining that the gossip has made her afraid to use the staircase. Their correspondence can hold these competing needs together, but their ability to help one another is shrinking. A reply can correct an account of distress without supplying the money, health or security its writer lacks.

The wedding enters the letters

Varvara’s decision to marry Bykov enters in a letter that explains why she sees no other sustainable future. She has worked until her health is damaged; she fears poverty and further dependence. Bykov, a man she already fears and who admits having behaved badly toward her, offers money and the prospect of restored respectability. She asks Makar to understand her decision and tells him she made it alone. Then Bykov arrives at the door, and she breaks off.

The interruption gives him power over the letter’s length before the marriage has taken place. In the days that follow, his demands occupy more and more of what the correspondents write. Varvara needs linen, lace, alterations to a collar and changes to embroidery. Makar goes between shops carrying instructions. The impulse that made him buy flowers now helps to prepare her departure.

On September 27, the instructions nearly overwhelm the letter. Varvara repeats the kind of embroidery she wants, apologizes for sending him on errands, admits her dread of the future, then returns urgently to the embroidery. Anxiety about the marriage and anxiety about a mistake in the order have become entangled. The practical demands keep reclaiming the attention she tries to give her fear.

Makar’s answer catches that entanglement with painful accuracy. He has done what she asked and would visit every shop in Petersburg to spare her trouble. When he takes up her dread, however, he reassures her that by seven that evening she will have learned everything: the dressmaker will have arrived. Then he specifies that he means the frills and finery. For a moment the promised answer to her future has shrunk to an appointment about clothes.

His devotion continues to find things it can do. The letters still send, receive and correct instructions; the wedding preparations depend on them. But the efficiency of that exchange advances the event he can barely contemplate. When Varvara asks him to cancel the earrings because Bykov finds them too expensive, Makar knows what to say to the jeweler. His own wishes are harder to put into words.

What remains on the paper

Before she leaves, Makar visits her former room and finds one of his letters being used as a spool for thread. Nearby lies the beginning of an answer: “My dearest Makar Alexievitch I hasten to—”. The embroidery is unfinished too. Work, writing and departure meet in things set down before they were complete.

The scrap preserves a familiar promise of speed without anything after it. Makar can still read himself being addressed, but cannot read what she was hurrying to say. In her farewell, Varvara entrusts him with that fragment and asks him to imagine the words she would gladly have added. At the opening she had answered the speech he invented for a curtain. Now she gives him an unfinished letter whose continuation must take place in his thought.

She also promises to write again, immediately qualifying the promise because she cannot know when. The farewell pulls against itself: renewed correspondence remains imaginable, while parting feels final. Her affection survives throughout. The book gives us no warrant to turn her departure into proof that she no longer cares, or to decide what letters she might ever write afterward.

What Dostoevsky ends is the exchange we have been reading. Makar’s final, undated letter answers her farewell with pleas, objections and imagined ways of stopping the journey. He offers to run behind the carriage and promises a new cloak when his pay comes. She is leaving before those wages can help.

His questions turn toward writing itself: “To whom should I write letters?” The pet names need someone to receive them; his improved style needs the woman for whom he has been practicing it. The thought of that improvement breaks into an admission that he scarcely knows what he is writing. He keeps adding to the page, trying to prolong the contact that the words still presume.

At the beginning, Varvara could follow Makar’s letter and correct the conversation he had invented. His address continues without the answering turn.

Dostoevsky leaves us with all the urgency of a letter written to change what happens next, at the point where the book has stopped giving it a next reply.

Sources

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Poor Folk, translated by C. J. Hogarth, Project Gutenberg no. 2302. Principal passages: April 8; May 20; June 1 and 20; August 11, 13 and 14; September 23–30 and the final undated letter. Hogarth renders Varvara as Barbara; the essay uses Varvara outside quotations. Quotations follow this English translation.