Facing Tradition: Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk as a Statement of Artistic Individuality

The present paper advances a new understanding of Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk (1846), - as a parody of literary patterns promoted by Natural School's ideology. Dostoevsky builds his text on an underlying network of literary conventions, artistic devices, and intertextual references, used in a parodic manner. In addition, the novel makes use of a complex narratological strategy, in which the two characters play several roles simultaneously. All this turns the text into a literary experiment, intended by the young Dostoevsky to define his original contribution to the Russian literary tradition, in an overt dialogue with Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolay Gogol. More specifically, it is the revival of the epistolary genre that allows Dostoevsky to engage in a dialog with his two predecessors. Therefore, Dostoevsky's debut novel should not be seen as a simple literary exercise, but, rather, as the assertion of its author’s artistic individuality in the context of the literary tradition.

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