Les Pauvres Gens
Dostoevsky completed his first novel, "Poor Folk", in May 1845. His friend Dmitry Grigorovich, with whom he was sharing an apartment at the time, took the manuscript to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who in turn showed it to the renowned and influential literary critic Vissarion Belinsky. Belinsky described it as Russia's first "social novel". "Poor Folk" was released on 15 January 1846 in the "St Petersburg Collection" almanac and became a commercial success.