[1] His Russian father was a retired hussar officer, his French mother, Cydonia de Varmont, was a daughter of a royalist who perished on guillotine in the times of the Reign of Terror.

[3] "I was taking my lessons of Russian from servants, local peasants but mostly from my father's old kammerdiener Nikolai... For hours on end was he waiting for the moment I'd be let out to play and then he'd grab me by the hand and walk me through fields and groves, telling fairytales and all kinds of adventure stories.

Nekrasov noticed his first published original short stories, "Theatre Carriage" (1844) and "A Doggie" (1845), both bearing strong Gogol influence,[2] and invited him to take part in the almanac The Physiology of Saint Petersburg he was working upon at the time.

Grigorovich's contribution to it, a detailed study of the life of the travelling musicians of the city called St. Petersburg Organ Grinders (1845), was praised by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky, to whom Nekrasov soon introduced him personally.

[7][8] In the mid-1840s, Grigorovich, now a journalist, specializing in sketches for Literaturnaya Gazeta and theatre feuilletons for Severnaya Ptchela, renewed his friendship with Dostoyevsky who in 1846 read to him his first novel Poor Folk.

[12] The realistic treatment of the life of Russian peasants in these two novels was praised by fellow writers Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Leo Tolstoy among others, and had a considerable impact on the writing of that period.

"There'd be not a single educated man in those times and in the years to come who'd read Luckless Anton without tears of passion and hatred, damning horrors of serfdom," wrote Pyotr Kropotkin.

Highlighting the brighter sides of the life of the Russian rural community of the time, they were closer to liberal doctrines then to the radical views of Nikolai Chernyshevsky who was gaining more and more influence in Sovremennik.

[3] Grigorovich's epic, sprawling novel Cart-Tracks (Prosyolochnye Dorogi, 1852) with its gallery of social parasites came under criticism for being overblown and derivative, Gogol's Dead Souls considered the obvious point of reference.

[16] Another novel dealing with the conflict between Russian serfs and their owners, The Settlers (Pereselentsy, 1855), was reviewed positively by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who still refused to see (what he termed) 'philanthropy' as providing the means for mending profound social schisms.

[17] Critics of all camps, though, praised Grigorovich's pictures of nature, the result of his early fascination with fine arts; numerous lyrical extracts from his books have made their way into school textbooks.

[2] Both The Fishermen and The Settlers strengthened Grigorovich's reputation and Nekrasov has got him to sign a special contract making sure he (alongside Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Ostrovsky and Leo Tolstoy) would from then on write for Sovremennik exclusively.

[2] School of Hospitality (Shkola gostepriimstva, 1855), written under the influence of Alexander Druzhinin (and, allegedly, not without his direct participation), was in effect a swipe at Chernyshevsky, but the latter refused to be provoked and personal relations between the two men never soured, even if their ideological differences now were irreconcilable.

Its title became a popular token phrase (used, notably, by Lenin in one of his 1901 works) and the play The Suede People based on this short story was produced at the Moscow Art Theatre by Konstantin Stanislavsky.

[2] Dmitry Grigorovich is generally regarded as the first writer to have shown the real life of the Russian rural community in its full detail, following the tradition of the natural school movement to which he in the 1840s belonged.

[24] Leo Tolstoy praised Grigorovich for having portrayed Russian peasants "with love, respect and something close to trepidation,"[25] writing of enormous impact his "vast, epic tapestries like Anton Goremyka have made.

[9] Some critics belonging to the Russian left (Vengerov included) made much of the fact that Grigorovich (as well as Turgenev) allegedly 'hated' Chernyshevsky; others considered his works deficient, for being not radical enough.