High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Poor Folk (Russian: Бедные люди, Bednye Lyudi), sometimes translated as Poor People, is the first novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 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.