[3] Rozanov's mature works are personal diaries containing intimate thoughts, impromptu lines, unfinished maxims, vivid aphorisms, reminiscences, and short essays.

Those works in which he thus attempted to recreate the intonations of speech form a loosely-connected trilogy, comprising Solitaria (1911) and the two volumes of Fallen Leaves (1913 and 1915).

He first attracted attention in the 1890s when he published political sketches in the conservative newspaper Novoye Vremya ("New Time"), owned and run by Aleksey Suvorin.

For example, Rozanov readily passed from criticism of Russian Orthodoxy, and even of what he saw as the Christian preoccupation with death, to fervent praise of Christian faith, from praise of Judaism to unabashed anti-Semitism and from acceptance of homosexuality as yet another side of human nature to vitriolic accusations that Nikolai Gogol and some other writers had been latent homosexuals.

His work was suppressed and largely forgotten in the Soviet Union, but there were some prominent writers, including Maxim Gorky and Venedikt Erofeev, among his admirers, and his ideas are thought to have exercised an influence on Vladimir Nabokov's approach to the everyday world of existence (быт/byt) as utopic.