[2] As a student he started publishing articles on the history of Russia and Ukraine in Russkoye Slovo, 1860-1861; Russkaya Retch, 1861; Otechestvennye zapiski, 1863; The Russian Messenger, 1863, and Vestnik Evropy, 1866.

[2][3] The leitmotif of Avseenko's articles was his opposition to Westernization and criticism of authors who were "trying to graft sick and foreign European tendencies onto Russian soil."

According to his theory, the mission of Russian literature was highlighting the "elemental, natural aspects of common Russia, potentially mighty but still unrealized, passive and restricted by an impassive mode of existence" and supporting the educated elite as the nation's driving force.

The latter has been particularly vexed with Avseenko, who dismissed his novels The Raw Youth and Demons as being "the works of a limited talent," given to "digging in dark and musty underground," never touching reality and "exploring intimate depths of human vice.

[9] Avseenko advocated the Pushkin tradition, as opposed to that of Gogol, the latter realized in the works by Alexander Ostrovsky, Nikolai Nekrasov and Vissarion Belinsky.

Saltykov-Schedrin called Avseenko's novels 'dated and moldy',[10] other reviewers noted the author's eagerness to come out as Leo Tolstoy's follower (whose philosophies he criticized).

"[11] In the early 1900s Avseenko's fiction was still widely read, critics in general regarded him a 'quality writer' and the 'master of the ordinary', according to Afanasiev brothers' biography.