Poor Folk

An ageing clerk and a young woman across the courtyard write to each other about rent, boots, tea and the impossibility of saying what they mean. Dostoevsky was twenty-four; Nekrasov and Grigorovich read the manuscript overnight, woke the author at four in the morning, and Nekrasov carried it to Belinsky announcing that a new Gogol had been born. It was his first book and the last one anybody call...