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Of the entire literary heritage of P. Yu. Todorov, his idylls and dramas represent the most valuable, the most significant part. And at the same time - the most contradictory, the most difficult to explain, because all the strengths and weaknesses of the writer's worldview and method are intertwined in it. You read "Nesretnik" or "Zmeyno" and you struggle to determine where realism ends and romanticism begins, you struggle to distinguish the democratic from the individualistic trends, to separate ours from the foreign, the commercial, the imported. Vain efforts - there is no boundary between the one and the other; qualities and shortcomings constantly flow together. Because these are qualities and shortcomings for us, from our, from a modern point of view. For the writer, both democracy and modernism are creeds, his aesthetic understandings represent a strange mixture of contradictory elements, some of which we will accept, and others we will reject completely. We would not be able to deal with this complex and delicate matter if we remained only in the views of the author's plan, if we were content only with outlining his intentions. The work of a contradictory artist is always richer than his own aesthetic views and declarations. This is also the case with P. Yu. Todorov. Because it reflects reality, the vital content breaks the framework of the literary school and often presents us with nuances and suggestions that even the author did not intend to give. In such cases, we must look at the works more broadly, evaluate them according to the ideas and images embedded in them, according to their impact on the contemporary reader, according to the objective results that are often obtained regardless of the subjective intentions of the author. This is especially necessary for the idylls of P. Yu. Todorov. Because in many cases we will value the objective result more highly than the writer's intention, we will prefer the relative independence of the artistic image to the actual intention of the creator. For us, what he created is more important than what he wanted to create.