Nikolai Ogarev was a gifted writer of poems and prose works during the eventful middle decades of the nineteenth century. Beginning his career under the influences of Romantic literature and philosophical idealism, Ogarev evolved over the years from Romantic poet to Realist chronicler of his life and times. Among some of his contemporaries he earned a reputation as a dark and depressing poet. Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigor'ev called him the poet of melancholy, and Aleksandr Vasil'evich Druzhinin described his poetry in an 1856 article for Biblioteka dlia chteniia (A Reading Library) as "meek, frail, and sad." Yet, the critic Petr Petrovich Pertsov might have been more accurate when he argued that what sometimes passes in Ogarev's poetry for Romantic malaise is in fact a deeply felt metaphysical anguish, a sad and bitter realization of the absurdity of things. This theme, which runs throughout Ogarev's poetry, occurs when--as in "(E. F...