The story was much discussed by the contemporary critics and garnered mostly positive reviews. The in-depth analysis were provided by Alexander Skabichevsky in Syn Otechestva[4] and Angel Bogdanovich in the October 1898 issue of Mir Bozhy, the latter describing the story "as a kind of setting for the environment where the Man in a Case rules". "Nikolai Ivanovich is a perfect representative of the very same world where [Belikov] for fifteen years has been exterminating in himself all those things that rise a man over the lowest, base level of meaningless existence," Bogdanovich argued.