Poor Folk

Poor Folk, sometimes translated as Poor People, is the first novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which he wrote over the span of nine months when he was 23-24 years old in 1845. It was originally published on January 15, 1846 in the almanac St. Petersburg Collection. Poor Folk was lauded by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky as being socially conscious literature, who (among others) hailed him as the new Gogol. However, Dostoyevsky broke with him shortly thereafter. 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.