Les Pauvres Gens
"Poor Folk" received nationwide critical acclaim. Dostoevsky observed that "the whole of Russia is talking about my "Poor Folk"". As soon as he read the manuscript for "Poor Folk", Belinsky named it Russia's first "social novel". Alexander Herzen praised the book in his essay "About the Progress of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia", noting the book's "socialistic tendencies and animations". The work was classified by critic Pavel Annenkov as a work of the so-called "natural school". The newspaper "The Northern Bee" recorded: