Schelling was the new Plotinus, Napoleon the new Caesar, Schiller the new Vergil; and the implication was clear that the Russians were the new Christians.

Nadezhdin had read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and, in his lectures at Moscow University in the early thirties, he likened Russia to a new band of barbaric hordes swarming over the collapsing West.

Mirsky wrote:...He began his career by publishing a series of scurrilous, though at times witty, articles against the Poets...

In 1831 he started a monthly magazine, the Telescope, where he continued his policy of belittling in the light of philosophical standards the achievement of Russian literature.

[3]In 1845 he participated in a secret commission set up by Tsar Nicholas I dealing with heretical currents in Russia.