In his article, the author is studying the phenomenon of the new “advent” of the genre of “psychological essay” to the sociopolitical journalism (mainly to the pages of the “Novy Mir”) in the “thaw” period (the 1960s). (The genre had been born in Russia in the 1830s to the 1840s.) The conclusion of the author is rather paradoxical: the scientific sociological methodology of research, based on extensive statistics and on materials obtained in the course of the research itself, turns out to be in actual fact more vulnerable as to the objectivity of the resulting conclusions than the result of the primarily subjective literary creative work – essayistic-documentary or even artistic.