Poor Folk

Written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Narrated by Roger May

Upon its first publication in 1846, Poor Folk was an immediate critical triumph. The influential critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that 'the novel reveals secrets about life and character-types in Russia of a kind never dreamt of by anyone else,' and the unknown twenty-five-year-old author was hailed as 'the new Gogol.'

Composed entirely of an exchange of letters between a middle-aged copy clerk and a young seamstress who live on opposite sides of a Petersburg tenement courtyard, the novel explores the emotional and psychological effects of a threatening urban environment on the psyches of poor people struggling to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SNR Audio
• Release date: Dec 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805360711

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian author and journalist. He spent four years in prison, endured forced military service and was nearly executed for the crime of reading works forbidden by the government. He battled a gambling addiction that once left him a beggar, and he suffered ill health, including epileptic seizures. Despite these challenges, Dostoevsky wrote fiction possessed of groundbreaking, even daring, social and psychological insight and power. Novels like Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, have won the author acclaim from figures ranging from Franz Kafka to Ernest Hemingway, Friedrich Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf.