[2] His experiences as a soldier provide the basis for his first stories, including the very first, "Four Days" (Russian: "Четыре дня"), based on a real incident.

[3][4] The essence of Garshin's personality is a "genius" for pity and compassion, as intense as Dostoevsky's but free from all the "Nietzschean", "underground", and "Karamazov" ingredients of the greater writer.Garshin's work is not voluminous: it consists of some twenty stories, all of them included in a single volume.

[7] In "Officer and Soldier-Servant" he is a forerunner of Chekhov; it is an excellently constructed story conveying an atmosphere of drab gloom and meaningless boredom.

"From the Reminiscences of Private Ivanov" — the title story in the most recent English language collection of Garshin's work — has the same Russo-Turkish War setting of "Four Days", and includes as minor players the characters from "Officer and Soldier-Servant".

[citation needed] "A Red Flower" translated as "The Scarlet Blossom" by Virginia Mary Crawford appeared in the London journal Time in Aug 1890.