He was obliged to publish the mangled remains in "The Woman's News," because there was hardly any other journal then left running.

After the Servian War (generally called abroad "the Russo-Turkish War") of 1877-1878, Uspensky abandoned the plebeian classes to descend to "the original source" of everything--the peasant.

When he published the disenchanting result of his observations, showing to what lengths a peasant will go for money, there was a sensation.

This was augmented by his sketch, "Hard Labor"; and a still greater sensation ensued on the publication of his "'Tis Not a Matter of Habit" (known in book form as "The Eccentric Master").

In "Hard Labor" he set forth, contrary to all theoretical beliefs, that the peasants of villages which had belonged to private landed proprietors prior to the emancipation, were incomparably and incontestably more industrious and moral than the peasants on the crown estates, who had always been practically free men.[37] Readers were still more alarmed by the deductions set forth in his "An Eccentric Master." The hero is an educated man, Mikhail Mikhailovitch, who betakes himself to the rural wilds with the express object of "toiling there exactly like the rest, as an equal in morals and duties, to sleep with the rest on the straw, to eat from one pot with them" (the Tolstoyan theory, but in advance of him), "while the money acquired thus by general toil was to be the property of a group of people to be formed from peasants and from actually ruined former members of the upper classes." But the peasants, not comprehending the master's lofty aims, treated him as an eccentric fool, and began to rob him in all directions, meanwhile humoring him to the top of his bent in all his instincts of master.