Sources and Literary Context of Dostoevsky’s Novel "Poor Folk"

The article considers literary self-definition of Fyodor Dostoevsky at the starting point of his career as a writer. Its purpose is to reveal connections of the young author with contemporary writers and his place in the literary process on the basis of specific texts. The article continues the research presented in two articles published in 2013 and examines a wider range of texts related to Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk. By applying the principles of comparative analysis to the repeated narrative elements, the author of the article shows that Mikhail Voskresensky’s story “Zamoskvoretskie Tereza i Faldoni” (1843), which is considered to be parodied in Poor Folk, has just one common feature with Dostoevsky's novel: names of one main and one secondary character. The names refer to a popular sentimental novel by Nicolas Germain Léonard (1783), retold with disapproval by N. M. Karamzin, while Voskresensky’s story was unworthy even of caricature for the insignificance of its content and its poetics. It should also be noted that not a single motif that exclusively belongs to this story was reproduced by Dostoevsky at any time later. The situation is quite different in the case of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Conspirators (Le Chevalier d’Harmental), published in a newspaper in 1841–1842 and as a separate edition in 1843. The novel’s plot twists, main characters, some features of their personalities and some details regarding what happens to them are reflected in Poor Folk. But this was not done for reasons of parody. Dostoevsky chose the novel by the famous Frenchman only to promote his own world view and the new principles of art – the nascent realism with its unadorned “truth of life”, harsh and often tragic reality in contrast to the benevolent romanticism