The autumn of 1830, which Pushkin spent in Boldino, was the most fruitful season in his creative life. After his return to Moscow he reported to Pletnev, “In Boldino I wrote as I have not written for a long time,” and presented his friend with a lengthy catalogue of his newest accomplishments. It included the last two chapters of Evgenii Onegin, “The Little House in Kolomna,” the four ”Little Tragedies,” and some thirty poems. The list was followed by Pushkin's “secret confession”: “That is still not all…. I have written five prose tales which are making Baratynskii hee-haw and kick about (“ot kotorykh Baratynskii rzhet i b'etsia”)—and which we shall also publish Anonyme.”

In 1899 a number of young writers formed a literary circle to discuss and analyze their works in progress. They considered themselves to be realists interested in portraying the mood of the intelligentsia and of the lower classes. They called the circle Sreda (“The Wednesdays”) for the day of their weekly meeting in the home of Nikolai Teleshov. Soon after its formation Teleshov invited Maksim Gor'kii to join the circle. At the time Gor'kii was a controversial figure who violently attacked everything the Russian intelligentsia stood for. He insisted that intellectuals would never accomplish their major objective—the liberation of the Russian people from political and economic oppression—unless they first liberated themselves. They had to cease being ineffective and moralistic and had to become selfish and aggressive individualists. Only then could they provide the Russian people with the leadership it desperately needed. Young intellectuals seeking inspiration, excitement, and escape responded enthusiastically to Gor'kii's call for self-liberation and idolized him. Members of the older generation were not so uncritical; they feared him as a harbinger of barbarism, a champion of criminals and outcasts, and an enemy of the intelligentsia.

When a young peasant in early nineteenth-century Russia was conscripted into the army from the taxpaying population, he underwent a fundamental change in juridical status: born into serfdom, he became a “free” man (vol'nyi chelovek) with a civic identity. He also entered a world of bureaucratic regulation that governed his daily routine and formalized his social relationships. While the master had unlimited control over his peasants, who were in fact his personal property, governmental regulation to some extent mediated relations between military commanders and their subordinates. In military society the state sought to legislate those paternalistic values that customarily defined relations between landlord and serf, relations conceived in the image of a father supervising his child. Theoretically this relationship combined paternal concern for the welfare of the soldiers with strict discipline and punishment. Like the biblical God, commanders were supposed to be both merciful and “terrible.”

The Kazan Square demonstration of December 6, 1876 was one of a number of attempts by revolutionary intelligenty to forge an alliance with the common people. Two striking features of this demonstration have often been noted. First, participants in the demonstration included not only members of the radical intelligentsia but also urban workers, an unusual feature for the first socialist street demonstration in Russia. Second, fewer workers took part than the radical intelligentsia had hoped, given their active propagandizing among factory workers. Some critics have found fault with the “abstract” nature of the propaganda, to use Georgii Plekhanov's later term. He and others blamed the limited worker participation on the failure of the populists to express concretely the real, immediate interests of the workers. Plekhanov later wrote that the workers of St. Petersburg could only have been drawn to the demonstration because it was a “new spectacle, not seen before.” The workers had no tangible reason for active participation in it. “For this reason they did not go to it.”