Orest Somov was one of the major figures in the Russian Romantic movement, but he was virtually forgotten almost immediately after his early death in 1833 at the age of thirty-nine. Only in the second half of the twentieth century has interest in him revived enough that efforts have been made to evaluate his contributions to the theory of Romanticism, to the development of the prose literary language, and to fiction itself. This earlier neglect doubtless was caused by the complex literary and political conditions that prevailed during the century after his death: first, his talent as an author was eclipsed by better-known contemporaries, especially Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol; then, with the advent of realism in the 1840s, interest in Romantic fiction quickly waned. In the Soviet period critical attention was paid to authors who might best be exploited for their political views and activities, such as Aleksandr...