In the late 1840 - early 1850s Grigorovich's fame started to wane. Partly, it got eclipsed by the publication of Ivan Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches", but also, his own works of the so-called 'seven years of reaction', 1848-1855 period were not quite up to the standard set by his first two masterpieces. Highlighting the brighter sides of the life of the Russian rural community of the time, they were closer to liberal doctrines then to the radical views of Nikolai Chernyshevsky who was gaining more and more influence in "Sovremennik". Several satirical short stories of this period ("Adventures of Nakatov", "Short Term Wealth", "Svistulkin") could hardly be called in any way subversive. The short novel "Four Seasons" (1849) has been described as "a kind of simplistic Russian low-life idyll" by the author himself. "Things are as bad as they've never been. What with censorship being now so fierce, whatever I'd choose to publish might get me into trouble," Grigorovich complained in an 1850 letter.