In September 1890, Alexander Ivanovich Ertel rented the Yempelevo hamlet, located 30 versts (roughly 33 kilometers) from Voronezh, and moved there with his family. The house had five rooms, a large fruit garden with alleys and ponds and more than 100 dessiatins of land (an archaic Russian land measurement dessiatin is equal to approximately 1.09 hectares). Ertel rented the land out to peasants to pay his own rent and only used the house itself and the garden. He hoped this place would help him get some rest from the hustle and bustle of the city and dedicate more time to writing.

From the end of 1890 to November 1891, the writer was working on “The Change” — his second big novel after “The Gardenins”. In a letter to the writer and philosopher Pavel Alexandrovich Bakunin dated December 14, 1890, he admitted,

In his novel, Ertel intended to show a broad picture of contemporary Russian society — the circle of educated raznochintsy (a social estate that included the lower court and governmental ranks, children of personal dvoryans, and discharged military), the everyday life of the Saint Petersburg nobility and the peasant environment. While in “The Gardenins” the writer put the social and economic problems in the foreground, this novel attached significant importance to the issues of politics and culture.

The main character of the novel, Andrey Petrovich Mansurov, belongs to a rich and noble family, albeit ruined; he is initially shown spending time at secular jours fixes, then among raznochintsy, then in the countryside and, finally, among the uyezd merchants. The new forces triumph and the old ones are to be superseded — this is the novel’s main idea.

According to the author, the new forces represent the new intelligentsia, originating from the raznochintsy. The novel portrays Dr. Mikhail Ferapontov, a scientist named Filat Bushmarin, a painter Afanasy Boriskin and other intellectuals with deep sympathy. While these educated characters, well-versed in arts and literature, empathize with the plight of the peasants, they are not united by a single idea that determines their behavior and beliefs. Ertel points to this weakness in the young and honest people as a characteristic feature of society in the 1880s.