POOR FOLK.* THIS is another of the Russian stories that
justifies Pushkin's exclamation, on hearing Gogol read some of his own works, " My God ! what a sad country Russia is !" Not that it insists on the dreary subjects peculiar to Russian * Poor Folk. By Fodor Lostoiewsky. Translated from the Russian by Lone /dilman. With a Oritieftl Intro:I:nation by Gleorge Moore, London : Elkin Mathews and John Lane. literature,—there is no mention of war, or Siberia, or Nihilism ; the characters in the little volume merely enact an unconscious idyll, they endure a life of grinding poverty and misfortune, and are finally separated for ever by a. remorseless Fate. We see existence through the darkest spectacles, and almost forget that there are lights as well as shadows in the great panorama of Life. Mr. George Moore has contributed a critical preface, which is in itself an excellent piece of writing. Without following him into his disquisition on the comparatively great and little in literature, and the re- spective merits of Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Bret Harte, we are quite prepared to allow that the author of Poor Folk deserves a front place in his native literature, though perhaps hardly on a level with the great master Turgeneff. According to Mr. George Moore, Russian fiction in general, and this story in particular, is distinguishable from English and French fiction by what he calls " the manner of weaving," or,• in other words, the workmanship and style. "In English and French fiction," he says, "we can follow the method. We can say, this is the point whence the design was started, and the threads were worked in such a manner, and the colour- harmony was composed in this or that way. But in Russian, fiction the manner of working is not to be detected, the picture is apparent only in the result." We quite agree that Poor Folk has a fascination of its own that it would be difficult to define, but it would be impossible to apply the metaphor of "weaving," with its accessories of complete design and colour-harmony, to a work deficient in completeness of form, totally innocent of design or plot, and in which the range of colouring is entirely neutral and sombre. Dostoievsky's method is more that of a student who dissects and studies the limb of some small creature under a microscope. He may discover unsuspected beauties as well as strange shapes and blemishes, but each limb is magnified enormously, and occupies a space in his perceptions out of all proportion with its real size and importance. The book is written in letters that pass almost daily between an old man, Inkar Djevuschin, and his distant cousin and opposite neigh- bour, Varvara Dobroselova. The man is terribly poor, the butt of his office, where, in all his thirty years of service, he has never risen above the post of copying-clerk, but quiet and inoffensive, except when he forgets his troubles in drink. Varvara is also terribly poor,—a penniless orphan, supporting herself by needlework, and hinting at mysterious persecutions. She writes the history of her early life for Mika; but either• the narrator or the translator has purposely left out some part of it, and we only find hints of wrongdoing and injustice on the part of a certain Anna F4dorovna and a mysterious " Mr. Bikov," who finally reappears and marries the heroine. A narrative written in the form of letters must necessarily be fragmentary and incomplete. We gather as much as the writers themselves can be supposed to see in the limited horizon of their daily lives ; but every conversation detailed, and every episode introduced, as a rule only serves to heighten the sense of artificiality. When exciting scenes are described, we wonder as much at the hero or heroine for sitting down calmly to narrate them, as we wonder in the course of an opera at the long solos and arias that interrupt and retard the action of the drama. But in this particular case the charm of the old, clerk's generous, self-sacrificing affection is revealed in his, nightly outpourings to the little cousin over the way, more completely than could have been done in any other form of story-weaving. In these letters he lays bare his whole heart. He lavishes his poor earnings and runs into debt over presents for his "little Varinka ;" he pours out his troubles to her and recounts the difficulties and sorrows of his fellow-lodgers ; he tells of his debts and his quarrels with his landlady, of his endeavours to borrow money, his downfalls and despairs, the rebuffs he meets with, and the unexpected kindness of his official chief. Through all the disjointed narrative runs the thread of pure disinterested love for his little cousin ; he tries• to hide it .under the cloak of fatherly affection, he begs her to. consider him her natural guardian, but through this flimsy cloak shines the love that Mr. George Moore says is like " the love of a man who is condemned to penal servitude for life for a mouse that comes into the solitude of his cell for crumbs." But Varvara is hardly more grateful than the mouse would, have been ; she accepts the crumbs, sometimes she reproaches. Wilcox for his extravagance, but in the next moment she implores him to lend her more money, and in the end she leaves him for a man whom she fears and for a life that she dreads, but in which she will have something better than crumbs. When she reproaches Maar for his extravagance, he writes in touching self-defence :—" Do not find fault with me because, old as I am, I ran into debt. How could I have acted differently? These reproaches hurt me so when they come from you, little friend. Do not be angry with we either for saying this; my heart is-so sore. Poor people are touchy, Nature has ordained it. The poor man expects so much ; he looks quite differently on God's light to what other men do, he steals side-glances at his fellow-men, be looks timidly round and listens to every word as though, forsooth, they were all spoken at him." He, poor, simple, half-witted old fellow, is so sensitive, so conscious of his ragged appearance, above all of his miserable boots, that in his darker days he imagines every one is pointing at his shabbiness. He is pathetic on the subject of his boots ; like Mr. Dick with King Charles's head, he cannot keep them out of his letters. When he is reading story-books in the long winter evenings, he imagines to him- self his own feelings if he bad written a book,—how people would point him out as the author or the poet, Djevuschin ; and then his thoughts recur to the subject uppermost in his mind, and he wonders how he could bear it if every one knew that the poet Djevusehin had ragged boots He owns in another letter that "boots are a trivial subject for a man to dream about ; " but from his point of view, a pair of soleless boots, though an ignoble subject, represent a poverty and degradation, a sense of painful humiliation that only those who have felt it can describe. Then comes the final blow, and Varvara passes out of his life for ever. There is a fine contrast between his futile expostulations, his generous devotion, and her comparative apathy. While she is anxious about the trimmings of her trousseau, and mingles forebodings of the future with fears about her flounces, he makes himself ill in executing her commissions, and tells her with unconscious irony that her anxiety as to the future will be solved for her in a few hours by the visit of her dress- maker. He breaks down utterly when she has gone, and leaving his squalid lodging moves across the way to her empty room. There he will at least torment himself with the sight of her embroidery frame, her half-finished work, he will occupy the long dreary evenings with reading over her letters. His heart is broken, the poor prisoner has lost his mouse.
The book is cleverly translated, the chief defect being a too frequent use of the conditional mood, and as far as we can tell without a knowledge of the original, the author's forcible and direct nervous style is well reproduced. Dostoievsky has evidently great sympathy with the poor, he describes (with Maker's pen) the " Noah's Ark " sur- roundings in which "poor folk" are forced to live, the close noisome atmosphere that kills cage-birds, the noisy lodgers, and the quiet folk that hide away in corners, their comedies and tragedies. The episode of Pokrovski the tutor and his grotesque old father, who follows his son's coffin with his hands and pockets full of books, the scene in the office where the old clerk receives an unexpected gift in place of a scolding, and the death of Gorsohkov, are related with a minute accuracy of detail that shows an acute and pathetic observation of life as well as great power of conveying the sense of that pathos to others. The one note of happiness in the whole book is sounded by Varvara, when she is relating herohildish recollections of sunny autumn days. "How fresh and clear the air ! Once more the fire crackled in the stove ; we would sit round the samovar, and our black dog Polkan,' .numb with the cold of the night, would look in at the window and wag his tail Masses of corn were laid up in the barns ; the straw roofs, the huge ricks, shone like gold in the sun ! And all was peace and happiness. We all thanked God for the harvest ; there was plenty of corn for the winter, so the peasant knew his wife and children would have enough to eat ; and, in the evenings, the girls would sing and dance merrily, and on Sunday, they would shed tears of gratitude as they prayed in God's house. 0 how happy my childhood was!" It is through Varvara also that we are given a glimpse of Dostoievsky's sympathy and feeling for Nature. A clear sunshiny September day recalls still more beautiful evenings on the lake near her old home. " Fishermen would often light little fires of brushwood on the shore, and the water would reflect the light ever so far. The sky, cold and grey, would be streaked at the edge with pink strips of cloud, which would gradually grow paler and paler ; then the moon would rise ; the air would be so still that the slightest sound was audible : the flatter of a startled bird, the slightest breath of wind that stirred the rushes, the jumping of a fish. A white transparent mist would rise from the water. The distance would grow dim, everything would seem absorbed into the mist, but all that was close at hand would be quite distinct as though carved in relief,—the boal-, the bank, the island, a broken cask that had been for- gotten on the bank rocking gently on the water, a broken bough covered with dead leaves entangled among the rushes, a belated water-bird fluttering ere it took a plunge into the cold water, then fluttering again and soon lost to sight in the mist." It is of course obvious, as Mr. Moore says, that no two people in such circumstances, no uneducated " poor folk" would write such letters to each other. The letters are merely the medium that conveys the author's thoughts to the reader, the literary microscope has revealed modes of life perhaps hitherto unrecognised. The real objection to most books written in such a form is not merely that it is an old-fashioned and conventional artifice, but that the form itself is crude and incomplete, that the story too often resolves itself into a succession of long harangues recounted in the first person singular, and that a volume of such letters is apt to be an extremely dull affair. However, there have been notable exceptions, as witness Clarissa, Evelina, and Redgawntlet, and in this particular instance Poor Folk gains in reality and pathos by the very means that in less skilful hands would be tedious and commonplace.
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