Described as an extraordinary maverick among his fellow writers, Aleksandr Grin is one of the most intriguing figures in Russian literature. The bizarre legends surrounding his name--most notably that he had escaped from penal servitude after murdering his first wife and that he was a seafaring desperado who skillfully plagiarized manuscripts stolen from an English sea captain whom he had killed in the Indian Ocean--were bolstered by his turbulent youth and by the strangely foreign, Anglo-Saxon quality of his work. These are, however, only legends, with no factual basis. The author of scores of stories, six short novels, and several autobiographical pieces, Grin had an irregular but fascinating career that spanned the 1905 revolution, World War I, the Bolshevik coup d'état of 1917, the consolidation of Soviet power in the 1920s, and the literary hegemony of the Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia proletarskikh pisatelei (RAPP, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers...