In his 1851 letter to Sreznevsky, Pogodin asserted that in reading the early Kyivan Chronicles, he detected no trace of the Little Russian language but rather of the Great Russian language, consciously or unconsciously aware of the fact that the chronicles had not been written in Old East Slavic but Church Slavonic. In 1841 Pogodin joined his old friend Stepan Shevyrev in editing "Moskvityanin" (The Muscovite), a periodical which came to voice Slavophile opinions. In the course of the following fifteen years of editing, Pogodin and Shevyrev steadily slid towards the most reactionary form of Slavophilism. Their journal became embroiled in a controversy with the Westernizers, led by Alexander Herzen, who deplored Pogodin's "rugged, unbroomed style, his rough manner of jotting down cropped notes and unchewed thoughts". Pogodin's main focus during the last segment of his scholarly career was on fending off Kostomarov's attacks against the Normanist theory. By that period, he championed the pan-Slavic idea of uniting Western Slavs under the aegis of the tsars and even visited Prague to discuss his plans with Pavel Jozef Šafárik and František Palacký. In the 1870s he was again pitted against a leading historian, this time Dmitry Ilovaisky, who advocated an Iranian origin of the earliest East Slavic rulers. His grandson Mikhail Ivanovich Pogodin (1884–1969) was a museologist.