He became a staunch Spiritualist and got himself involved in heated correspondence defending his views, polemicizing with Dmitry Mendeleyev and criticising Leo Tolstoy for having ridiculed what he had little information about in The Fruits of Enlightenment, a broad swipe at Spiritualism.

[3] As a fiction writer Wagner made his mark as an author of popular books for children, the most successful of which, Skazki kota Murlyki (Cat Purr's Fairytales), a collection of twenty five finely written mystical and philosophical fables and stories, came out in 1872.

Wagner's fairytales, a peculiar mix of hazy mysticism and harsh realism centered around the theme of good against evil, elicited lively debate in the pedagogical spheres in Russia, the majority of critics agreeing that they had nothing to do with children's literature whatsoever.

The fact that Skazki have been re-issued a dozen of times in the pre-1917 Russia (since 1918 Wagner's work stopped being published altogether) attests for their popularity, although apparently mostly with the adult readership.

In retrospect more sympathetic literary historians found in the novel as well in some other later works by Wagner elements of prescience; the latter had to do, though, not with conspiracy theories, but rather with science, psychology and parapsychology, some precipitating Freudian ideas.

The biographer Viktor Shirokov hails him as "Our Russian Andersen",[2] Savely Dudakov called his essay on Wagner Evil Fairy-teller, while A. Goryashko combined both attitudes in a biography called The Bad Good Man[1] Some of the critics (Dudakov among them) tended to explain the uneasy fact that the author, who became quite famous for his humanistic fables, preaching universal love and kindness, later in his life all of a sudden shifted dramatically to the right, owning up to the ideas that several years later would lead to pogroms, in terms of Wagner's progressing mental illness.