About the book: year / Two topics occupy a central place in this review - firstly, the depiction of folk life in literature, and secondly, in connection with the first The theme is the role of the people, the “man,” in history. Who “writes” Russian history – those whom Saltykov called “historiographers” in “Signs of the Times,” or a man who is outside the boundaries of historical life? The very mediocre playwright D.I. Lobanov follows in his supposedly “folk” drama (in fact, historical melodrama) the tradition according to which the importance of a man is equal to the importance of a fly, which explains Saltykov’s sharply negative review of the drama “Dark Affair”».