Viktor Tepliakov was a poet and travel writer who is traditionally identified as one of the lesser lights of the “Pushkin pleiad.” In his lifetime Tepliakov published two volumes of verse and a travelogue, Pis'ma iz Bolgarii (Letters from Bulgaria, 1833), which brought the history and scenery of that land into the purview of the Russian reader. As a young man he held a commission in a cavalry regiment; one of his fellow officers and friends was the celebrated swashbuckler Petr Pavlovich Kaverin. Although Tepliakov was not a member of the Decembrist conspiracy, he was imprisoned in 1826 for his reluctance to swear an oath of allegiance to Tsar Nicholas I. His imprisonment was followed by a term of enforced penance in a monastery and a period of exile in the south of the country. In the last twelve years of his life he did much traveling abroad, visiting the...