Chapter 41: The Poor

As a pauper currently sprinting toward a life free from want for food and clothing, Mikhail found it hard to say he could do much for others; after all, in the face of the era's suffering, what an individual could achieve was always too little.

But regardless, doing what one could for others was, in the end, a somewhat bitter comfort.

Tomorrow has tomorrow's sufferings, but at least he hoped others' present would be slightly easier for now.

And precisely because he knew he could do little, Mikhail was, more or less, avoiding forming too deep a connection with some people.

For this reason, even though Mikhail had seen this little beggar several times in a row, he ultimately never asked about the child's situation; first, he worried about making the child recall bad memories again, and second, Mikhail truly feared that hearing the story might make his own life, which had not yet broken free from debt, even more complicated.

As for the child, he had most likely remembered that Mikhail was a kind old gentleman; as long as he could see him, it meant he would surely gain something today.

Yet even so, Mikhail still saw this child not often; it seemed he could only spot the boy whenever the child was starving beyond endurance or had to come for some other reason.

Once, before leaving, the child even shoved a worn wooden carving into Mikhail's hands and immediately bolted, as if fearing Mikhail would refuse or throw it away in front of him.

For this, Mikhail merely silently accepted it; after scratching his head for a long while, he finally made a difficult decision in his heart: once his financial situation improved a bit, perhaps he could ask a little about the situation of this rather polite child.

Damn it, I just hope this little act won't drag me from modest prosperity back into poverty.

In fact, if he only wrote normally, Mikhail couldn't earn that much money; although Russian writers' fees were certainly high, the works Mikhail had memorized in his mind were, in a sense, truly one less with each use.

After all, if one seriously studied a writer's lifetime output, one would find that besides their representative works, they often produced quite a bit of textual garbage; writers with every piece being a masterpiece were almost non-existent.

But Mikhail was different; every single piece was a masterpiece among masterpieces, a classic among classics, and some indeed could not be used yet, needing to wait for a suitable moment.

Therefore, to get started in the short term, he still had to rely on going all-in on a collection of essays, and then, if possible, take over the magazine The Contemporary; only then could he truly be called free from want for food and clothing.

And the key figures in The Petersburg Collection, besides those great poets and great writers as well as some minor poets and minor authors, included one existence that could be called the core.

That was Dostoevsky's The Poor.

Speaking of it, Old Dostoevsky was also a dream-chasing artsy youth in his youth; giving up a perfectly good job, he resigned and went into the sea to make a living by writing; at that time, he was just a novice who had only begun writing; the reason he made such a choice was, as he wrote in his letter:

"I submit my resignation because, I swear to you, I can no longer continue in office. What pleasure is there in life when the best times are snatched away in vain? The point is I never intended to serve long-term, so why waste my youth?"

Although he later indeed became famous in one stroke, there was a gap of nearly half a year in between; besides relying on his job to sustain his livelihood, Old Dostoevsky naturally relied even more on his brother's support, ahem.

And with the passage of time, finally, Mikhail's new novel, after an interval of nearly three months, was about to appear in the literary magazine once again.

"The Sleepy One" had experienced quite a few twists and turns, while the other work went much more smoothly; after all, this piece contained nothing too intense, and was mostly just flashes of human nature.

Hmm, after a big one, one must always follow with a gentle one to cool some people down, lest they can't take it and really put Mikhail on a blacklist.

When the twenty-fifth of this month finally arrived, along with the opening of various bookstores and cafes, young people one by one walked in; as before, some came straight up and asked: "Has The Fatherland Notes arrived?"

But if before they paid more attention to the critic named Belinsky, now as soon as they got the magazine, they began searching for an author's name.

This author had appeared only once, but undoubtedly left an extremely profound impression, so much so that many remembered his name.

But one problem was also obvious: if the debut work was so stunning, could the subsequent articles really be of the same quality as the previous ones?

Those two such excellent articles; even the author himself, could he really write equally excellent articles again?

Some held doubts, but more were full of expectation; among these people, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was the one full of expectation, and compared to others, perhaps his expectation was even greater.

And this was, of course, because the neurotic youth had gained more from those two novels than from many works he had seen before, so much so that when he began writing his own new work, he found it unexpectedly smooth, as if he had learned the secrets of creation from them.

But recently he had encountered a bit of a bottleneck again; therefore, when the latest New issue of The Fatherland Notes came out, this thin, small man hurriedly walked into the bookstore, took out the little money remaining in his pocket, and wanted to grab the magazine as soon as possible.

But there were really many young people who shared this thought with him; after much effort, Dostoevsky finally squeezed out of the crowd; seeing the young people who had already started reading the magazine aloud or sharing their views, Dostoevsky, although very much wanting to join them, thought of his recent financial situation and, in the end, could only harden his heart and turn away.

And after arriving at his place of residence, this neurotic man hurriedly opened the magazine in his hand; his fingers trembled slightly, and his eyes soon fell on the title of the first novel: The Poor.

"In a hut where fishermen lived, the fisherman's wife Sanya sat under the lamp mending an old fishing sail. The wind howled and wailed in the yard; the waves crashed against the shore, making a rustling sound.

The sky was dark and cold, but inside the fisherman's hut it was warm as spring; the stove fire had not yet gone out. On the bed hung with white mosquito nets, five children slept soundly amidst the roar of the sea. Sanya's husband had gone out to sea early in the morning and had not yet returned. She listened to the clamor of the waves and the howling of the wild wind, her heart uneasy."

(End of this chapter)