It is no coincidence that Dostoevsky in his first work, “Poor People,” puts as an epigraph a quotation from Odoevsky’s “The Living Dead.” Even the intonation of the hero’s spoken language goes into Dostoevsky’s story, and the epigraph seems to be part of Makar Devushkin’s letter. “Oh, these are storytellers for me! There is no way to write something useful, pleasant, delightful, otherwise they will reveal all the ins and outs of the earth! I should have forbidden them to write! Well, what does it look like, you read... you can’t help but think, and then all sorts of rubbish comes to mind; it would be right to prohibit them from writing; It would be easy to just ban it altogether.”