Gone is the contained, brooding, dream-prone atmopshere of his earlier stories; instead Uncle's Dream is narrated with firm objectivity, combining satire, social reportage, puppet theatre and farce in its comic send-up of small-town manners and morals.

Dostoyevsky's inspiration for The Meek Girl came from a newspaper report on the suicide of a seamstress who plunged from a garret window, holding a religious icon in her hands. According to the critic John Jones, it is "one of the most powerful studies of despair in world literature, a banging on closed doors imagined with abosolute fearlessness.