The proposed article is included in a series of articles under the general title "Creative Portrait of NA. Field in the literary memories of the 1850s - early 1860's. ", Already published in various scientific publications. Widely known memoirs of this period create a single historico-literary context with AI's literary criticism. Herzen, N.G. Chernyshevsky and A.V. Druzhinin, from the new, modern positions summed up in the middle of the century the results of the thirty-year development of Russian literature.