It was Zaytsev who chose to take Saltykov-Shchedrin's remark concerning Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done as a pretext for instigating the long and bitter feud with Sovremennik which came to be known (via Dostoyevsky) as 'the break among the nihilists'.

[1] In 1866 after Dmitry Karakozov's attempt at the life of the Tsar, Zaytsev was arrested and spent several months in the Petropavlovskaya Fortress.

In 1869 he left Russia and, having veered towards the anarchists and Mikhail Bakunin in particular, launched the Italian section of the 1st International in Turin.

Among the books he translated were Litteratur u. Kultur im 19 Jahrhundert by Johann Jakob Honegger, The Works by Ferdinand Lassalle (1870), Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian (1875), James Guillaume's Anarchy According to Proudhon (1874), Denis Diderot's Novels and Novellas in 2 volumes (1872).

Starting with volume 3 he succeeded Nikolai Chernyshevsky as a translation editor of the World History by Friedrich Christoph Schlosser (1861—1868).