[2] In his October and November 1870 letters to Pyotr Schebalsky he complained about the whole chapters being thrown out, and asked this respected literary critic, close to the magazine to exert his personal influence over Katkov to protect him from these "tortures", calling one of the editors, Lyubimov, "the monster, Atilla, the killer of literature.

[6] According to Andrey Leskov, in Alexandra Ivanovna Syntyanina the author portrayed his father's aunt Natalia Petrovna Strakhova, who was also forced to "enjoy the dubious privilege of being the wife of a madman from very early years."

The relations between old man Bodrostin and Princess Vakhterminskaya in At Draggers Drawn are very similar to those between Schadursky and Baroness von Dering in Krestovsky's 1864 novel The Slums of Saint Petersburg.

The novel has been panned as tendentious, reactionary, and occasionally even anti-Semitic, on the basis of there being a minor character named Tikhon Kushevsky, who was both a Jew and a cynical crook.

"[2] The first attempt at reviewing At Daggers Drawn objectively in the USSR came in 1978 when Irina Stolyarova in her essay "Searching for an Ideal" suggested that the novel should be regarded as not so much an attack on the social democrats of its time, as a 'research', motivated by its author's "desire to respond quickly to the hot issues, cast the newly emerging character types, reveal new mindsets and new relations that were starting to take shape in the Russian life of the time.

I am convinced that crookedness had leached upon nihilism exactly in the same way it's been leeching upon idealism, theology or patriotism..."[2][15] In 1998 in Moscow the TV series of the same title was filmed at the Maxim Gorky's Studio by director Alexander Orlov who also wrote the script.