The first version (marked as of June 3, 1924, by Vera Muromtseva) told the story of a "moral fall" of a young man who has been degraded and compromised by a local village counterman.

Some of the sketches concerning the main character's relations with a village teacher, Ganhka, formed the plot of a short story called "April" (Апрель).

Another spin-off was "Rain" (Дождь), a short story which was supposed to reveal in detail the chain of events that led to Petya's (such in this case was the hero's name) suicide.

"As for the title, that summer [1924] a boy named Mitya visited Grasse, rich land-owner's son, quiet, self-conscious and very young Russian aristocrat.

Ivan Alekseevich instantly imagined how such a person could have been be tempted into something wrong by a village's starosta - for the simple motive of extorting a bottle of vodka off him, and that was how the novel started.

The Lithuanian poet Kostas Korsakas remembered Bunin in a conversation with him relating how an Italian translation altered the finale into something more optimistic, so as "to let young boy instead of killing himself, drive his love home to full realization".

"[1] The French poet and novelist Henri de Régnier held Mitya's Love as equal to best examples of the classical Russian literature.

[5] The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke sent a letter to Russkaya Mysl magazine[6] in which he methodically analysed the main character's behaviour and motives.

Having read just part one of the book, Vladislav Khodasevich sent a letter to Sovremennye zapisky, arguing that "Bunin is all right when he doesn't fall for his best-loved recipe: 1% The Kreutzer Sonata, 100% pure water".

More subtle but even less sympathetic was the reaction of Zinaida Gippius who came up with a cycle of essays entitled "Of Love" intended to be published in the Sovremennye zapisky magazine.

Bunin, on having read Gippius' essays, as editor Mark Vishnyak remembered, "lost his temper and, in effect, vetoed their publication in Sovremennye zapisky.

In a letter dated March 17, 1936, Bunin wrote, "Dear Pyotr Mikhailovich, it just so happened that I've never read "The Devil"... And of those fragments in it that resemble [my] description of Mitya and Alyonka's rendez-vous I've learned from your article.