Mr. Prohartchin (Full Version)

In Mr. Prohartchin, Dostoyevsky turns a cramped Petersburg boarding house into a pressure-cooker of rumor, ridicule, and watchful need. Semyon Ivanovitch Prohartchin is an aging, low-ranking clerk—quiet, prickly, obsessive about his meager possessions, and convinced he must live as if he has nothing to spare. His fellow lodgers, amused by his habits and suspicious of his guarded little trunk, bait him with tall tales and petty humiliations until his fragile equilibrium begins to crack.

As the story tightens, Dostoyevsky explores a familiar but devastating knot in his early fiction: the psychology of deprivation—real or imagined—and the way fear can deform dignity into miserliness, secrecy, and paranoia. By mingling farce with sudden moral shock, the tale exposes the social cruelty of “harmless” jokes and the loneliness of a man who cannot trust anyone, least of all himself. A darkly comic, compassionate classic of the Russian city and its invisible sufferers.

• Listeners drawn to Dostoyevsky’s early, sharp-edged psychological portraits of ordinary clerks, lodgings, and urban humiliation.
• Fans of classic short fiction that blends satire and farce with an abrupt, haunting moral turn.
• Readers interested in themes of poverty, shame, secrecy, and how social ridicule can become a form of violence.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) is one of the defining novelists of world literature, renowned for his psychological intensity, moral inquiry, and unforgettable characters. After early success with Poor Folk (1846), he endured arrest, a mock execution, and years of exile and penal servitude—experiences that deepened his lifelong engagement with suffering, faith, and conscience. His masterpieces include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. “Mr. Prohartchin,” from his early period, already shows his gift for exposing the inner life of the overlooked and the socially crushed.