h phase of development in the '70's
of the last century, the careful study of the people, two men headed the
movement, Glyeb Ivanovitch Uspensky and Nikolai Nikolaevitch
Zlatovratsky. Uspensky (1840) took the negative and pessimistic view.
Zlatovratsky (1845) took the positive, optimistic view.[36]

Like many authors of that period, adverse conditions hindered Uspensky's
march to fame. Shortly after his first work, "The Manners of Rasteryaeff
Street," began to appear in "The Contemporary," that journal was
stopped. He continued it in another journal, which also was stopped
before his work was finished, and that after he had been forced to cut
out everything which gave a hint at its being a "continuation," so that
it might appear to be an independent whole. He was obliged to publish
the mangled remains in "The Woman's News," because there was hardly any
other journal then left running. After the Servian War (generally called
abroad "the Russo-Turkish War") of 1877-1878, Uspensky abandoned the
plebeian classes to descend to "the original source" of everything--the
peasant. When he published the disenchanting result of his observations,
showing to what lengths a peasant will go for money, there was a
sensation. This was augmented by his sketch, "Hard Labor"; and a still
greater sensation ensued on the publication of his "'Tis Not a Matter of
Habit" (known in book form as "The Eccentric Master"). In "Hard Labor"
he set forth, contrary to all theoretical beliefs, that the peasants of
villages which had belonged to private landed proprietors prior to the
emancipation, were incomparably and incontestably more industrious and
moral than the peasants on the crown estates, who had always been
practically free men.[37]

Readers were still more alarmed by the deductions set forth in his "An
Eccentric Master." The hero is an educated man, Mikhail Mikhailovitch,
who betakes himself to the rural wilds with the express object of
"toiling there exactly like the rest, as an equal in morals and duties,
to sleep with the rest on the straw, to eat from one pot with them" (the
Tolstoyan theory, but in advance of him), "while the money acquired thus
by general toil was to be the property of a group of people to be
formed from peasants and from actually ruined former members of the
upper classes." But the peasants, not comprehending the master's lofty
aims, treated him as an eccentric fool, and began to rob him in all
directions, meanwhile hu