Many of Saltykov’s polemical speeches in Sovremennik are devoted to the ideological struggle with the journals of the “pochvenniks”, “Vremya” and “Epoch”. One of the active employees of “Epoch” was N.I. Solovyov, who after the death of Ap. Grigoriev, along with N.N. Strakhov, became the leading critic of the magazine. Saltykov did not deign Solovyov with a critical analysis of all three of its volumes. Since individual chapters of this work were published in the form of small brochures, the satirist settled on one of them - with the expressive title “Vanity of Vanities.” The very idea of such an obsessive popularization of Solovyov’s book, which was advertised by the publisher as a “wonderful work,” could not help but seem pretentious, vulgar and surprisingly appropriate to the title “Vanity of Vanities” to Saltykov. The brochure treated moral problems from that abstract moralistic point of view, which Saltykov branded with the name “swift” philosophy in Sovremennik.