Perhaps the single most popular writer of the 1830s and 1840s in Russia, Osip Senkovsky fell into such disfavor under the onslaught of the utilitarian critics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that his name has scarcely survived to the present day. Beginning with Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky, the traditional critical attitude toward him was firmly set on a negative course. To Belinsky and the socially oriented critics who followed, Senkovsky was a reactionary, a man who turned his formidable irony and beguiling wit against almost every aspect of contemporary life--delving, probing, exposing, and ridiculing. His skepticism of all accepted values, whether scientific or aesthetic, was seen as a form of cynicism by the Socialist Realist critics of the Soviet era. Few Poles or Russians were willing to accept him as their own, even those who acknowledged his erudition, intellectual capacities, wit, and genius for scientific research. Despite the...