In September of that year he wrote to the Moskovskaya Vest correspondent: "I've just finished the first part of a large novelet called Dry Valley".
The Sukhodol estate bore close resemblance to a family country house in the Oryol Governorate owned by Bunin's uncle Nikolay Nikolayevich where Ivan with his younger sister Masha were frequent guests.
Pyotr Kyrillovich character in the book was a veiled portrait of Bunin's grandfather Nikolay Dmitrievich (whose mother, born Uvarova, died young).
"In Sukhodol Bunin summed up the whole of the [Russia']s past and endowed it with magnificent monument", he wrote in Sovremenny Mir (Modern World).
"Dirty, hungry, eaten through to its very bones by illnesses and lice – such is Russia as seen through the eyes of Sukodol' author," argued L. Kozlovsky in Russkiye Vedomosti.