In his first article, called "Productivity as Related to Wealth Distribution" (1842), he critically analyzed Adam Smith's theory and suggested an idea of workers' receiving shares of the profit.

[2] Soon he quit it due to ill health and spent half a year in Germany, France and Switzerland, where he studied extensively political economy, philosophy and chemistry.

The second part of the article was to be a critical analysis of "the progressive thought in Russia," focusing on Vissarion Belinsky, but got banned and later appeared in miscellaneous fragments.

In his first major article, on poet Aleksey Koltsov, Maykov came into direct conflict with Belinsky, accusing him of "biased and unfounded criticism" and "literary dictatorship".

By this time Maykov's philosophy changed: inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach and Western Socialists he came up with his own concept of "harmonical man" and "ideal civilisation", seeing, among other things, national and ethnic differences as totally superfluous.

In 1861 Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote warmly of Maykov's short legacy, then in 1868 Ivan Turgenev published a piece on him in his Literary Memoirs.

[1] According to the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, Maykov "wasn't a gifted writer in the common sense of the word," his style of writing was "anemic and occasionally murky", his analysis of Herzen and Tyutchev's works not original.