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Search - POOR FOLK - THE GAMBLER (Everyman's Library)

POOR FOLK THE GAMBLER - Everyman's Library
Author: FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

FICTION POOR FOLK and THE GAMBLER BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY -- FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY, born at Moscow on 30th October 182 I . Sent to penal settlement at Omsk in 1849 for revolutionary activities released in I 8 54. Resumed literary work, and died on 28th January 1881. -- THESE two examples of Dostoevskys art are sketches set in widely differ... more »ing frames. The one concerns a gambler who frequents the fashionable spas and casinos of Germany the other consists of a series of love-letters exchanged between two poor folk whose lives are spent amid the slums of St. Petersburg. Yet there is this in common between the two sketches-that each of them ends on a note of hinted tragedy. Both the gambler and the pair of sorrowful lovers ask as the curtain falls Is there any hope for us Sometimes it is said of Dostoevsky that he could not see the comedy of life as well as he could the tragedy yet humour abounds in these two works, even as it does in sundry others by the same author. Both the aged grandmother in The Gambler and Makar Dievushkin in Poor Folk are genuinely humorous types. Possibly the former has been met with in fiction before, and will be met with again but a character, though stereotyped in its main features, may yet be presented with such freshness, insight, and sympathy as almost to seem new. Consequently, if the stem, outspoken old lady who, instead of doing as desired by her spendthrift heir, suddenly surprises him in his evil courses, is not an altogether novel creation, she at least strikes out for herself a new line and possibly earns the readers sympathy thereby by plunging into courses equally evil. Makar Dievushkin, again, in Poor Folk, displays many a flash of unconscious humour. An old out-at-elbows tchinovnik, or minor official in the public service, he indites to the woman to whom, to quote his own words, I have devoted my life in its entirety, a series of love-letters which reveals a measure of tenderness, selfsacrifice, and fidelity scarcely to be surpassed. Yet with it vii viii Introduction all, the poor old man is for ever thinking of his style of writing, and lamentjng that he cannot better it. He boasts feebly of the neatness of his calligraphy, but gives way to despair at the thought that he cannot hope to rival, in literary creativeness, a scribbler friend of his named Rataziaev-three examples of whose penny dreadful effusions he quotes, in the fond belief that they are not simply execrable. The poor overworked sempstress to whom he addresses his letters takes him sharply to task for thus conceiving a goose to be a swan, but Makar remains only half convinced. Still he considers the ability to write in good style the greatest achievement to which mankind can aspire. The fact that, for the sake of the woman he loves, he is able to face grinding poverty, hardship, ridicule, insult, and, ultimately, the failure of his dearest hopes is, in his eyes, an achievement not worth mentioning in comparison with the composition of such tales as Rataziaevs-tales which read like extracts from the turgid bombast formerly known in England as transpontine drama or from the patter of a troupe of nigger minstrels...

ISBN-13: 9781408630853
ISBN-10: 1408630850
Publication Date: 10/26/2007
Pages: 324
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Greenslet Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

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