For in proportion as culture spread among the masses of society, and the center of the intellectual movement was transferred from the noble class to the plebeian, in the literary circles towards the end of the '50's there appeared a great flood of new forces from the lower classes.

The three writers above mentioned, as well as Uspensky and Zlatovratsky, belonged to the priestly plebeian class.

Ryeshetnikoff's famous romance--rather a short story--was the outcome of his own hardships, sufferings, and experiences.

He was scantily educated, had no aesthetic taste, wrote roughly, not always grammatically, and always in excessively gloomy colors, yet he had the reputation of being a passionate lover of the people, despite the fact that his picture of the peasants in his best known work is generally regarded as almost a caricature in its exaggerated gloom, and he enjoys wide popularity even at the present time.
* * * * * The spirits of people rose during the epoch of Reform (after the Emancipation of the serfs in 1861) and the general impulse to take an interest in political and social questions was speedily reflected in literature by the formation of a special branch of that art, which was known as "tendency literature," although its more accurate title would have been "publicist literature." The peculiarity of most writers of this class was their pessimistic skepticism.

This publicist literature was divided into three classes: democratic, moderately liberal, and conservative.
At the head of the democratic branch stood the great writer who constituted the pride and honor of the epoch, as the one who most profoundly and fully reflected it, Mikhail Evgrafovitch Saltykoff (1826-1889).