‘And what did you write your “Bowl of life” from? I asked him when I remembered some pieces from the book I’ve just read after the ‘Student’. — The fact that every girl has her happy summer is, by the way, about my sister Masha. Before she got married, she often strolled in the garden, with her velvet ribbon on, and was singing lezghInka. And after the marriage, when she spent a year without her husband, an assistant engineer, she also somehow cheered up, often went to the factories in the neighboring KolontAyevka estate, there was a pine alley, it had some special smell of jasmine that summer… I took this alley to ‘MItya’s love’ later, and it was all so pitiful and sad! And MordOvian costumes were worn by the young ladies TUbbe, and there was also Ariston and again this lezghInka… Father Cyrus? Father Cyrus… This comes from Leonid Andreev. … And some things in SElikhov — from brother EvgEny. He also bought a phonograph, and there was a palm tree in his living room. And the main source of inspiration for writing all these, was an impression I got from one of the streets in YefrEmov. Imagine a wide sandy street, going uphill, middle-class houses, heat, languor and hopelessness… this was that very feeling, it seems to me, which gave birth to the “Bowl of life”.

The Samara newspaper wrote about the characters of the story on December 11, 1913: “… people whose fate is predetermined from birth, who will not fight with fate, will not seek anything, will not strive anywhere, will not overcome anything. What can be interesting for the reader in the world of their emotions? But the power of talent makes the reader feel the interests of their unremarkable life, experience tragedies with them, the inconspicuous tragedies of this tragic, though unremarkable life, and just for a moment to feel sorry about their death…”