The hero, Tamarin, was seen by the author as a development of the Pechorin character; another 'superfluous man', eager to put his worthy qualities and moral strength to a socially useful action and failing to find any.

Even less successful with critics was his Between the Two Fires (1868) novel, featuring landlord Kamyshlintsev as a main character, whose occupation seemed to be "dreaming of big love and of some great cause to pursuit" and whom Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin defined as "the type of a Wanton Russian man".

[1] Novelets Magdalene, The Motley Life and The Dried-Out Love (all 1870), dealing with married women's spiritual tribes and tribulations, established Avdeev as a "divorce suit specialist", according to Saltykov-Shchedrin.

By this time the writer's popularity waned, yet critics from the liberal camp were eager to give him credit for "helping to slacken these crashing fetters of a formalist morality and introduce the humane approach to the stale atmosphere of the society's notions about canons of family life," as Alexander Skabichevsky has put it.

Avdeev's 1874 collection of essays Our Society as Shown in Heroes and Heroines of the 1820–1879 Russian Literature followed the Dobrolyubov's style of analytical social criticism, yet failed to produce the similar response.

[4] And yet, according to the Russian Literary Dictionary, "both readers and critics of the time admired Avdeev for his gift of storytelling, coupled with willingness to respond eagerly to any trendy theme or social issue."