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The first work Dostoyevsky published was a rather free and emotionally intensified translation of Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet; and the French writer’s oeuvre was to exercise a great influence on his own fiction. Dostoyevsky did not have to toil long in obscurity. No sooner had he written his first novella, Bednyye lyudi (1846; Poor Folk), than he was hailed as the great new talent of Russian literature by the most influential critic of his day, the “furious” Vissarion Belinsky. Three decades later, in The Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky recalled the story of his “discovery.” After completing Poor ...(100 of 4734 words)