Written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845, Dostoyevsky was in financial difficulty because of his extravagant living and his developing gambling addiction; although he had produced some translations of foreign novels, they had little success and he decided to write a novel of his own to try to raise funds. Poor Folk is an epistolary novel -- that is, a tale told as a series of letters between the characters. And oh, what characters these are!
