Abstract

The article gives a new insight into how prolific the genre of the physiological sketch was in European literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century and how, in turn, it became the foundational genre of the Russian Natural School, at the time when Dostoevsky entered the literary scene in 1846. The genre appeared first in France and England and spread to Russia, where it was taken up by progressive writers and critics and made into a flagship for the sociological representation of the nation through its professions and social occupations. National types, such as the baker, the street sweeper, the lawyer, the clerk and many others were subjects of the sketches. However, when Dostoevsky took up the form of the sketch in his early work Poor Folk, he transformed the typical characters of the nation into subjects who did not fit into the sociological explanation of personality and departed from the poetics of the Natural School. The second part of the essay is devoted to a brief analysis of Dostoevsky’s new poetics and its transformation of the context of the Natural School in which it was engendered.