Poor People

A New Translation

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

They have nothing but words. And words are everything.

Makar Devushkin is a copying clerk living in a corner of a communal apartment, earning barely enough to survive. Across the courtyard lives Varvara Dobroselova, a young woman of respectable birth now fallen into desperate poverty. When Makar begins sending her small gifts and letters, a correspondence begins that will become their lifeline—and their undoing.

Through their exchanged letters, two souls reveal themselves completely. Makar, aging and anxious, pours out his fears, his small triumphs at the office, his desperate need to maintain dignity in a world designed to strip it away. Varvara shares her past—the seduction that ruined her, the exploitation she endured, the crushing weight of being a woman alone without means or protection. Their bond becomes everything: part friendship, part unspoken love, part mutual dependency in the face of a city and a society that would prefer they simply disappear.

But compassion cannot pay debts. Kindness cannot buy bread. As Makar sacrifices what little he has to support Varvara, he spirals deeper into poverty and humiliation. And when a ghost from her past returns with an offer that promises security at the price of everything else, both must confront what survival actually costs.

Written when Dostoevsky was just twenty-four, Poor People announced the arrival of a major literary talent. In this intimate, psychologically penetrating debut, the future author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov created an unforgettable portrait of lives lived on the margins—not as objects of pity or sociology, but as fully human, achingly real, deserving of dignity even when the world offers none.

Some poverty is material. Some poverty is the soul's.

The masterwork that launched one of literature's greatest careers.