He found his true path in 1846, when the success of his first sketch from peasant life, "Khor and Kalinitch," encouraged him to follow it up with more of the same sort; the result being the famous collection "The Notes (or Diary) of a Sportsman." These, together with numerous other short stories, written between 1844-1850, won for him great and permanent literary fame.
The special strength of the "school of the '40's" consisted in its combining in one organic and harmonious whole several currents of literature which had hitherto flowed separately and suffered from one-sidedness.

The two chief currents were, on the one hand, the objectivity of the Pushkin school, artistic contemplation of everything poetical in Russian life; and on the other hand, the negatively satirical current of naturalism, of the Gogol school, whose principal attention was directed to the imperfections of Russian life.

To these were added, by the writers of the '40's, a social-moral movement, the fermentation of ideas, which is visible in the educated classes of Russian society in the '40's and '50's.

As this movement was effected under the influence of the French literature of the '30's and '40's, of which Victor Hugo and Georges Sand were the leading exponents (whose ideas were expressed under the form of romanticism), these writers exercised the most influence on the Russian writers of the immediately succeeding period.

But it must be stated that their influence was purely intellectual and moral, and not in the least artistic in character.