The article studies literary sources of the plot about the arrival of a landowner in the village, presented in A. F. Pisemsky’s novel The Troubled Sea (1863). The paper reveals that the model of this plot was formed in the stories of the pre-reform period, i.e. at the turn of the 1850s–1860s. Especially often stories with this plot were published in M. N. Katkov’s magazine Russkiy Vestnik (The Russian Bulletin). The main feature distinguishing this plot is the image of a landowner coming to the village. It was found that his description was stereotypical: the youthfulness and progressiveness of the hero’s views were invariably emphasized. In the stories of this time, the confl ict arises between a young progressive landowner and a representative of the older generation (father / neighbor / an elderly servant, etc.). Also, an obligatory element of the plot in question is the reorganization of the economy with a modern twist by the recently arrived landowner. The main motive associated with the reconstruction is the total destruction of everything considered old. The paper shows that attempts to rebuild the economy have always been unsuccessful and led to serious dramatic or tragic results. In the post-reform period, the plot associated with the arrival of the landowner in the village became a ‘derivative semantisation’: it adapted to the new relevant tasks that became the focus of attention after the peasant reform. The paper analyzes in detail the variant given in the story of A.V. Druzhinin Last Summer in the Village (1862). It is shown that the novel The Troubled Sea contains a large number of references to this particular variant. In the course of the comparative analysis of these works, it is concluded that Pisemsky argued with Druzhinin on some issues related to the peasant reform and its results. In conclusion, it is inferred that the plot of the landowner’s arrival in the village in the novel The Troubled Sea was obviously guided by the stories in Russkiy Vestnik. Pisemsky shared the view of Katkovsky’s edition in interpreting the behavior model of the landowner, who began to reorganize the life of peasants under the infl uence of democratic literature.