Biographical facts about Vyacheslav P. Polonsky, including a record of his work in publishing, and historical research into M. Bakunin. The article offers a review of the critic’s ‘literary portraits’ of B. Pilnyak, I. Babel, and Y. Olesha: they examine each writer’s individual style. The author particularly dwells on Polonsky’s essay about V. Mayakovsky, written after the poet’s death, which mentions, among other topics, the urban ‘material’ imagery in his early works and argues that hyperbole was the main tool in Mayakovsky’s artistic method. Further in the article, the author examines the critic’s polemic with L. Grossman about the prototype of Nikolay Stavrogin from Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed [Besy]. Upon a careful study of documents and personal accounts of contemporaries, Polonsky denies that Bakunin could have been Stavrogin’s prototype. The critic’s theoretic and polemic output are targeted against the narrow, class-oriented approach to literature; he spares no effort in describing the dialectic and structural nature of the artistic form.