[2] In February 1820, he moved to Moscow, where he attended both the theater and lectures at Moscow University; he visited Saint Petersburg and met Alexander Griboyedov, Vasily Zhukovsky, Faddei Bulgarin, and other literary figures, and began a literary career, publishing articles, poems, and translations in the journals of the day.

In 1825, he started his own journal, Moskovskii telegraf (The Moscow Telegraph), hoping to attract the writers he admired, like Pushkin, as well as emphasize the positive contributions of the merchant class to Russia.

The brilliant and idiosyncratic critic Apollon Grigoryev wrote in his memoirs, "From our present [1864] point of view it would be impossible to conceive anything more indecent than the article that the editor of the Moscow Herald [i.e., Mikhail Pogodin] hurled against The History of the Russian People, if the articles [by Nikolai Nadezhdin] against it in the old men's European Herald had not been even more indecent...

In Russian Romantic Criticism: An Anthology, Lauren G. Leighton says, summing up the contributions of Nikolai and his brother and collaborator Ksenofont:No one should argue that the Polevoys were comparable in literary taste and talent to the aristocrats of the Pushkin pleiad; their self-educated, self-made characters are apparent in their journal.

[6]The journal was closed down because of a bad review it gave a play by Nestor Kukolnik; Bernard Pares tells the story:It must be understood that the vast distances and the thinness of population in Russia practically confined journalistic enterprise to St. Petersburg and Moscow.