A deep but odd friendship develops between them until Dobroselova loses her interest in literature, and later in communicating with Devushkin after a rich widower Mr. Bykov proposes to her.

Initially offered by Dostoyevsky to the liberal-leaning magazine Fatherland Notes, the novel was published in the almanac, St. Petersburg Collection, on January 15, 1846.

[2] The first English translation was provided by Lena Milman in 1894, with an introduction by George Moore, cover art design by Aubrey Beardsley[3] and publication by London's Mathews and Lane.

Devushkin's, for example, is merely a portioned-off section of the kitchen, and he lives with several other tenants, such as the Gorshkovs, whose son groans in agonizing hunger almost the entire story.

Her father dies and they move in with Anna Fyodorovna, a landlady who was previously cruel to them but at least pretends to feel sympathy for their situation.

Just as he is out of money and risks being evicted, Devushkin has a stroke of luck: his boss takes pity on him and gives him 100 rubles to buy new clothes.

His mother's subscription to the Library of Reading enabled the family entry into the leading contemporary Russian and non-Russian literature.

Other formative influences were the works by the poets Alexander Pushkin and Vasily Zhukovsky, heroic epics usually by Homer and chivalric novels by Cervantes and Walter Scott.

As the school required 800 rubles per year, his father had to do additional work and ask his aristocratic relatives, the Kumanins, for money.

It is a serious and elegant work ..."[17] Sometime around April 1845, his friend Dmitry Grigorovich, with whom he had shared an apartment since the autumn of 1844, proposed giving the manuscript to poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who was planning to issue an anthology in 1846.

Shortly afterwards the doorbell of his house rang, and he opened the door to the excited Nekrasov and Grigorovich, both of whom congratulated him on his debut novel, of which they had only read 10 pages.

[18] Dostoevsky proposed to issue Poor Folk in the Fatherland Notes, but it was instead published in the almanac St. Petersburg Collection on January 15, 1846.

Later critics stated that the sentimental-humanitarian Poor Folk contained a great deal of parody and satire of Gogol books; however, there are some dissenters.

Victor Terras thought that Dostoyevsky did not use satire except in a few cases, but instead employed a "humor derived from the eternal conflict between the simple soul of a good man and the complex apparatus of the soulless, institutionalized society run by 'clever' people.

"[23] Joseph Frank, who suggested that the whole work is a "serious parody", recalled that Poor Folk burlesques the "high-society adventure novel, the Gogolian humorous local color-tale" and "the debunking physiological sketch".

"[25] The Contemporary stated "In this work comedy is somehow explored and includes an appreciable tone, colour and even the language of Gogol and Kvitka".

[26][27] "Through his tale", wrote The Northern Bee, "Dostoyevsky wanted to utilize Gogol's humour with naive simplicity of the undisturbed Osnovyanenko [pen name of Kvitka].

[29] This view does not imply that Dostoevsky did not offer innovations since this novel also distinguished itself by humanizing those that were – in Gogol's tale - mechanical and lifeless.

According to critic Rebecca Epstein Matveyev, Pushkin's "The Stationmaster" serves as a "thematic subtext, as a basis for Devushkin's literary experiments, and as a resource for his epistolary relationship.

Dostoevsky may have chosen the epistolary genre to include his personal critical observations, similar to real-life letters between writer and addressee.

This is demonstrated, for instance, in the suggestion of something dishonorable in Varvara's past as well as the fact that she and Devushkin are distantly related, hinting an incestuous love.

[31] Other sources contributed in this view such as Konstantin Mochulsky who said that "the motif of an old man's loving a girl with its vague interweaving of eroticism and 'paternal affection' is one of Dostoevsky's favorite themes.

"Nikolay Dobrolyubov, in the 1861 essay "Downtrodden People", wrote that Dostoevsky studies poor reality and expresses humanistic ideas.

He also praised him for illustrating human nature and taking out "souls in the centre of the depth which are caged after protesting for identity against the exterior, violent pressure, and presents it to our verdict".