According to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, having published the Saint Petersburg Organ-Grinders in the spring of 1945, the young writer was planning to spend that summer in his village but before the departure stayed at the house of Nikolai Nekrasov.

[1] According to modern critic and biographer A. Meshcheryakov, in The Village Grigorovich's attempt to make a move from a set-of-sketches kind of documentary collage to a novel genre was not entirely successful.

Still, those were the years when the Natural School movement in Russia was getting closer to the very bottom of a real life and Grigorovich's debut has played a decisive role, according to the critic.

[2] The Village proved to be a healthy antidote to the officially approved "peasant literature" propagated by journals like Mayak (Lighthouse), praising good-natured, God-loving Russian muzhik and his benevolent, caring master.

Characteristically, the original version where Akulina's landlord was shown as a tyrant, has been changed to a more neutral portrait, a clear sign of the author's seeing the system, not its particular proponents, as the real evil, according to A.