To assist him with the magazine, the poet asked Nikolai Gogol, Pyotr Vyazemsky and Vladimir Odoyevsky to contribute their works to the journal.

Soon it became clear that Pushkin's establishment could not compete with Faddey Bulgarin's journal, which published more popular and less demanding literature.

Sovremennik was the first to publish translated works by Charles Dickens, George Sand and other best-selling foreign writers.

Despite these hardships, Sovremennik published works by the best Russian authors of the day: Leo Tolstoy, Turgenev and Nekrasov.

The death of Dobrolyubov in 1861, an 8-month suspension of publishing activities (in June 1862), and Chernyshevsky's arrest caused irreparable damage to the magazine.

He invited Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (stayed until 1864), Maxim Antonovich, Grigory Yeliseyev and Alexander Pypin to join its editorial staff.

(written in the Peter and Paul Fortress), satires by Saltykov-Shchedrin, and works by the so-called plebeian authors (Vasily Sleptsov, Fyodor Reshetnikov, Gleb Uspensky).

After that, Nekrasov and Saltykov-Schedrin acquired the rights to publish the Otechestvennye Zapiski, a literary journal widely viewed as Sovremennik's successor.