Aleksei Andreevich Rzhevsky's brief but productive career as a poet was for a time almost completely forgotten in the annals of Russian literary history, and his legacy was measured (if at all) in terms of his achievements in the civil service rather than in literature. This situation was largely a result of Rzhevsky's choice to devote most of his adult life to career advancement. After his rather abrupt exit from the literary scene at age twenty-seven, awareness of Rzhevsky's role in Russian literature diminished to the point that his name was only recognized in conjunction with a poem by Gavriil Derzhavin addressed to him. Rzhevsky's obscurity finally came to an end in the 1920s with the work of the pioneer of eighteenth-century Russian literary studies, Grigorii A. Gukovsky, and modern scholars have begun to appreciate Rzhevsky's place in the development of Russian literary culture. Still, biographical data on...