Upon its first publication in 1846, Poor Folk was an immediate critical triumph. The influential critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote that 'the novel reveals secrets about life and character-types in Russia of a kind never dreamt of by anyone else,' and the unknown twenty-five-year-old author was hailed as 'the new Gogol.'
Composed entirely of an exchange of letters between a middle-aged copy clerk and a young seamstress who live on opposite sides of a Petersburg tenement courtyard, the novel explores the emotional and psychological effects of a threatening urban environment on the psyches of poor people struggling to survive.
