On one of my many trips to Europe, I stayed in a small village northeast of Rome. While I was there, I came upon a small bookshop. Curious, I walked into the shop looking for old historical books. I started to talk to the owner about history and particularly the history of this region of Italy. He said he had several books, which he showed to me. I had some of those books in English, his were in Latin. We discussed the original documents that some of the authors used as background material. That...
When Poor Folk was first published in 1846, Dostoyevsky — one of nineteenth-century Russia's most important authors — was just twenty-four years old. The novel brought him immediate critical and public acclaim. A poignant societal and physiological sketch, Dostoyevsky's masterpiece is written in the form of letters of correspondence between two characters, both trapped within the poverty and circumstance of St. Petersburg's slums. Makar is a writer...
