Aleksandr Ivanovich Ertel' remains best known for his epic novel Gardeniny, ikh dvornia, priverzhentsy i vragi (The Gardenins, their Servants, Retainers, and Enemies, 1889), although not long after his death in 1908 he was largely forgotten. Ivan Alekseevich Bunin remarked in 1929, "Who has forgotten his friends and contemporaries: Garshin, Uspensky, Korolenko, and Chekhov? In fact, he was no lesser a writer than they (with the exception of Chekhov, of course), and in some respects he was even greater." Ertel's particular contribution to Russian letters lies in his talent as "ethnographer" of the philosophical-religious renaissance that began in the 1880s and 1890s in Russia. Ertel', however, sought through his art not only to convey something of the felt quality and diversity of that cultural revival but also to allow his works to form a dialogue with questions that were both practical and speculative regarding Russia: given a period of dramatic change...