Essays on Russian prose writers from the Napoleonic to the Crimean Wars. During this period Russian culture and prose literature emerged as an autonomous phenomenon, no longer dependent on the patronage of the state. Includes discussion of the impact writing during this period had on the ever-widening abyss between the government and the literate public, the search for a national identify, the Decembrist Revolt and the resurgence of freemasonry.

Whether the writers in this period described the war, the Great Terror, the gulag experience, exile, repression, or simply everyday life in the city or in the country, they generally turned to a "major theme of Russian literature since the Revolution the fate of the individual human being in a mass state." In the literature often the state won, due to its power; at other times individuals triumphed, because of their moral convictions. The same can...