Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky was one of the brightest representatives of a whole galaxy of Narodnik writers of the 1860s. In his works, he turned to the depiction of peasant life. Motifs of peasant life were already present in Uspensky’s works in the 1860s, such as the stories “Village Encounters”, “Village on a Sunday” and “Beggar”, which raised acute social issues of that time.
However, the first major work about the post-reform village, which marked a new stage in the writer’s career, was a collection of essays entitled “The People and the Ways of Contemporary Village. (From the Country Diary)”. The essays were first published under different titles in the Otechestvennye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) magazine in 1877, 1878, 1879 and 1880 and cited “G. Ivanov” as the author.
Throughout the writer’s lifetime, the essays were republished as a cycle of stories four times — as a separate edition in 1880 and in three editions of “Gleb Uspensky. Collected Works” under the title “From the Country Diary”. The essays were based on Uspensky’s observations of the life of peasants in the Novgorod and Samara Governorates, where he lived from 1873 to 1879.
The writer partially revised his stories for a separate edition. Many edits were made to the style of the text, its imagery and language. There were also some lexical changes: dialectal forms and colloquialisms that were too expressive were replaced by standard literary expressions.
Gleb Uspensky gave a copy of “The People and the Ways of Contemporary Village” to Alexander Ivanovich Ertel with an inscription,
