«Русское слово»

The article emphasizes how the participation in Russkoye Slovo impacted the writer’s creative personality, mindset, spiritual and moral as well as aesthetic notions being formed. The writer was in the center of the literary events of the 1860s and he held responsible posts at the editorial board.

The article contains an overall systematic and comparative analysis of the critical reviews on A. F. Pisemsky’s novel A Thousand Souls in the contemporaneous printed media. The analysis is done from the following points: journal discussion of the type of Pisemsky’s talent, innovations in the image of the main character, and the novel problem range and its relation to the «accusatory literature» of the 1850s.