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Poor Folk, Dostoevsky’s first novel, announces early on the centrality of both Pushkin’s work and his status as author.Along with his reaction to Gogol, Dostoevsky’s response to Pushkin was an essential part of his plan to make a space for himself in Russian literature. Poor Folk appeared in print in , but months before its publication it had already been read in manuscript and hailed by Russia’s greatest literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky (–), who told the young author that if he remained true to his talent he was destined to be a great writer.1 Dostoevsky ’s literary debut was the most spectacular in Russian literature of the nineteenth century. (Only with publication of The Brothers Karamazov thirty-three years later was he to receive comparable acclaim for a work of fiction.)2 Belinsky praised Dostoevsky’s work not only because of its artistic merit, but also because he believed it to be the first accomplished example of the social novel that he was advocating for Russian literature. He had told P.V.Annenkov (–), soon to be a noted literary critic himself,that Poor Folk“was our first attempt at a social novel; moreover it was accomplished as is customary among artists,who themselves do not even suspect what they have done.”3 Poor Folk is more than a social novel, yet by calling attention to the social aspect of Dostoevsky ’s first work, Belinsky was already pointing—perhaps unwittingly— to one of the ways in which Dostoevsky was attempting to differentiate himself from his illustrious precursor. Poor Folk is an epistolary novel, a sentimental novel in letters, a form that by  had long become antiquated, even for Russian literature. Dostoevsky’s bold revival and transformation of the genre underscore the originality and experimental character of his earliest fiction. The  chapter  The First Confrontation Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk and Pushkin’s “The Stationmaster” novel recounts the love of its hero, Makar Devushkin, an unprepossessing forty-seven-year-old petty clerk in the tsarist bureaucracy, for a distant relation, Varenka Dobroselova, a young girl of seventeen, who has been seduced and abandoned by a client of the procuress with whom she and her mother had been forced to lodge. Devushkin attempts to give Varenka, who is impoverished and in poor health, emotional and economic support. At first, he seems successful. But his extravagant expenditures, which include expensive sweets and gifts, take their toll: he goes into debt, becomes destitute, begins to drink heavily, and ends up for a time being supported financially by Varenka herself. Realizing that Devushkin is an unreliable source of physical and financial assistance , as well as moral support, Varenka decides to marry her seducer, Bykov (who has suddenly conceived an immediate need of an heir), and, at novel’s end, is about to leave with him for the country, abandoning Devushkin in Petersburg. Given Devushkin’s deep attachment to Varenka—and the parallels that Dostoevsky establishes with other characters , in and outside the novel, who perish after similar reversals—the reader assumes that Devushkin, as he himself openly suggests, will not survive his “abandonment,” but will die of a broken heart. The question of influence arose even before Poor Folk was published, but it was not Pushkin, but Gogol who was perceived as the strongest influence on the young Dostoevsky. The similarities between Poor Folk and the works of Gogol (–), especially “The Overcoat” (“Shinel”), were obvious to most of Dostoevsky’s first readers. N. A. Nekrasov (–), one of the first to read the manuscript, came rushing to Belinsky, proclaiming that a“new Gogol had arisen”(Novyi Gogol’ iavilsia).4 In an  article in which he discusses Poor Folk in some detail, Belinsky directly addresses the question of Gogol’s influence, maintaining that Dostoevsky is an independent talent and therefore cannot be called an imitator of Gogol despite Gogol’s influence in many parts of Poor Folk,especially in phraseology.But this Gogolian influence, Belinsky remarks, would soon disappear, though Gogol would remain, so to speak, Dostoevsky’s literary father, and Dostoevsky would always operate in the literary territory opened up by him.5 Belinsky was only one of many critics to address Dostoevsky’s relationship with Gogol. Not a few alluded specifically to the similarity of Poor Folk to Gogol’s “The Overcoat”in theme,plot,and style,6 a comparison that Dostoevsky intentionally invites by incorporating a discussion of “The Overcoat” into one of his hero...

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