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 called sentimental. Thirty-two plates of carriages, terraces and officials by painters including Pavel Fedotov and Sylvester Shchedrin bring the cramped, comic world of the letters into view.