Dmitrii Pisarev's literary voice was recognizable for its fluidity, extreme pronouncements, and absurd paradoxes. In iconoclastic essays on themes ranging from student life to anatomy, education, European history, Charles Darwin, and Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin to the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, and Leo Tolstoy, he set the agenda for the literary and political polemics of his day. Nonetheless, Pisarev's thought remained influential well into the first decades of the twentieth century. His name occupied an important place in both prerevolutionary and Soviet histories of the radical intelligentsia, social thought, and literary criticism. Several late-twentieth-century Russian-language biographies of Pisarev and the appearance of the first volume of a new collection of his complete writings and letters testify to continued interest in his life and work. Intellectually, Pisarev is most closely associated with nihilism, an extreme form of radicalism of the 1860s. Along with Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and...