The biography of Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov is murky and full of riddles. He lived a short and strange life. He began to write late (at the age of thirty) and wrote only five tragedies, three of which enjoyed outstanding success. An official of the Ministry of Finance and a fairly powerful bureaucrat, he attained widespread fame suddenly and for several years was considered Russia's best dramatist. Just as suddenly he found himself in a remote village where he endured the failure of what may have been his best tragedy, went out of his mind, and soon died. He was quickly and undeservedly forgotten.

Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov was born 30 September 1769 in the village of Kazanskoe (some accounts place his birth in Borka) in the Zubtsovsky district of Tver province. He belonged to an old but impoverished noble family. His father, Aleksandr Irinarkhovich, was a landowner of average means who...