However, the Physiology of Petersburg, a two-volume anthology published in 1845, became extremely popular. Belinsky participated in it under the editorship of young Nikolai Nekrasov, the poet, gambler, and entrepreneurial publisher. Nekrasov saw that the foreign bookstores in Petersburg were selling many copies of small, elegant books from Paris titled Physiologie de l’amoureux or Physiologie du flaneur, with amusing descriptions of all Parisian types. So Nekrasov collected articles by his friends about Petersburg mores and personages. He wanted to make money, and he needed something sensational. The book he put together gave the stunned reader a picture of the Russian capital that had nothing to do with Bashutsky’s cloying Panorama.
Even though Nekrasov’s collection contained Belinsky’s brilliant thoughts on the popular theme Petersburg and Moscow, as well as articles about the Imperial Alexandrinsky Theater and the typical clerk and journalist of the capital, most of the space was devoted to the city’s outskirts and lower depths—coachmen, organ grinders, tramps, drunkards, and prostitutes, huddled in filthy attics or stinking cellars.
Gogol’s style and ideas clearly influenced this collection. The authors were not embarrassed by their dependence on him; on the contrary, they flaunted it. For instance, the illustration for Nekrasov’s satiric poem “The Clerk” was a funny wood engraving of the hero of the poem angrily reading Gogol’s Overcoat.
Establishment reviewers were outraged: “How could people with unspoiled, much less with refined taste find interesting caricatured descriptions of the dirtiest sides of the lives of a janitor, lackey, coachman, cook, store keeper, evening butterfly or dolly?” As usual, the reading public responded vigorously to this rhetorical question: the entire press run of Physiology of Petersburg sold out immediately. Its success was promoted by two rave reviews. Each appeared anonymously but were written by the anthology’s two main contributors—Belinsky and Nekrasov. Obviously, in the increasing competition for readership, journalistic ethics did not count for much.
Inspired by his success, Nekrasov quickly prepared a new edition, Petersburg Anthology, which came out in early 1846. Once again, Nekrasov, Belinsky, and other leading writers took part, but what really put this publication on the historical map was the debut of twenty-four-year-old Fyodor Dostoyevsky, with his novel significantly titled Poor Folk.
Dostoyevsky wrote Poor Folk in a little over nine months in a narrow furnished room in an apartment house near St. Vladimir’s Cathedral in Petersburg, the result of an intensive psychological insight the author later called “the vision on the Neva.” He had seen a Petersburg story taking place in dark corners, a pure and honest petty clerk, a humiliated and sad girl….
Gogol’s Overcoat, the quintessential Petersburg parable of a clerk, had been published only two years earlier. “We all came out of The Overcoat,” Dostoyevsky is alleged to have said. But the beginning writer, borrowing much from Gogol, had rejected his cruel irony. His hero is no grotesque marionette but a living, suffering, thinking man, described with warmth and lyric grace. He loves and is loved, but that love ends tragically, for there can be no happiness in a city where there is “wet granite underfoot, around you tall buildings, black, and sooty; fog underfoot, fog around your head.”
Gogol read and generally liked Poor Folk but he failed to appreciate the originality of Dostoyevsky’s style. He found the work too wordy and “talky.”
Dostoyevsky himself did not realize at first that Poor Folk was sounding a completely new note in Petersburg literature. He worked on the novel another half year after it was finished—Dostoyevsky never again polished his work this thoroughly. His roommate, the young dandy Dmitri Grigorovich, who had already published a story, full of bravura, about organ grinders in Physiology of Petersburg, took the manuscript to his friend Nekrasov. Grigorovich and Nekrasov started reading the novel aloud, in turn, and stayed up all night. When they got to the last page, Nekrasov wept unashamedly.
And in a typically Russian burst of spontaneity now called “Dostoyevskian,” they decided to visit Dostoyevsky. It was a warm white night in May. Dostoyevsky was back from a nocturnal walk and sitting in the window, too excited to sleep, when Grigorovich and Nekrasov burst in. All three began an agitated, exalted conversation with outbursts, quick leaps from topic to topic, and copious quotations from the shared idol, Gogol. The scene could have been a page from some future novel of Dostoyevsky’s.
