Poor Folk
Dostoyevsky's first novel, "Poor Folk", an epistolary novel, depicts the relationship between the elderly official Makar Devushkin and the young seamstress Varvara Dobroselova, a remote relative. The correspondence between them reveals Devushkin's tender, sentimental adoration for his relative and her confident, warm regard for him as they grapple with the bewildering and sometimes heartbreaking problems forced upon them by their lowly social positions. The novel was a success, with the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky calling it "Russia's first social novel", for its sympathetic depiction of poor and downtrodden people. Dostoyevsky's next work, "The Double", was a radical departure from the form and style of "Poor Folk". It centres on the disintegrating inner and outer world of its shy and 'honourable' protagonist, Yakov Golyadkin, as he slowly discovers that his treacherous doppelgänger has achieved the social respect and success denied to him. Unlike the first novel, "The Double" was not well received by critics. Belinsky commented that the work had "no sense, no content and no thoughts", and that the novel was boring due to the protagonist's garrulity, or tendency towards verbal diarrhoea. He and other critics stated that the idea for "The Double" was brilliant, but that its external form was misconceived and full of multi-clause sentences.