Todd writes about the “widespread obsession with literature as a activity” in the (.)ĢThe novice Dostoevsky was defining himself in a literary landscape in which writers passed the time reading themselves and others aloud. Those that occur in Poor People put forth a unique quartet of doublings and interactions between the virtual and the real that, far from seeming outdated as they did several decades ago, now seem unusually fresh and relevant. Dostoevsky has long been recognized as a master of doubling, whether through narrative devices, plot motifs or through representation of character. Is Poor People an account of the relationship between a meek character or a would-be petty tyrant and a helpless young woman or a resourceful, pragmatic one? Or is the basic unit of personality a protean one? Poor People provokes fundamental questions and contradictory responses in its readers in the same way as do Dostoevsky’s other important works. The virtual clashes with and endeavors to supersede the actual.

Poor People, a short novel in the already outdated epistolary form re-emerges in our present era of email, twitter and other social media as a starkly modern work in which the two primary characters, near neighbors, literally read each other in preference to being in each other’s company. From the first of Dostoevsky’s fictions, Poor People (1846) to his last, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), acts of reading and misreading have functioned as primary vehicles for characters’ efforts to both understand and, whether deliberately or inadvertently, to misrepresent themselves and others.

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