The article belongs to a series of articles entitled «The portrait of N.A. Polevoy in literary memoirs of the 1850-s – early 1860-s», already published by different scholarly publications. Well-known memoirs from the period, together with criticism by Gerzen, Chernyshevsky, and Druzhinin, constitute a new literary-historical context which enabled a mid-XIX-th century reassessment of the previous thirty years of Russian literary history
