Poor Folk (Annotated with Biography)

Poor Folk, sometimes translated as Poor People, was the first novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, which he wrote over the span of nine months. First published in 1846, it was lauded by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky as being socially conscious literature, who (among others) hailed him as the new Gogol.

This book was partly inspired by Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat, whose male protagonist is also a copy clerk. This novel is written in the form of letters of correspondence between the two main characters. Like "The Overcoat", the novel gives a profound account of the lives of low income Russians in the mid-nineteenth century.