The life of Aleksandr Levitov, in its bare outline, is typical of many of the raznochintsy, those young Russian intellectuals who were neither of the gentry nor the peasantry and who were struggling to make their mark on the cultural scene in Russia in the late 1850s and 1860s. Like his contemporaries, such as the critic Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov and the writers Nikolai Gerasimovich Pomialovsky and Fedor Mikhailovich Reshetnikov, he was born into poverty; like them, he made a painful break with the clerical tradition of his family and struggled to acquire an education and gain entry into the world of literature. After a relatively brief career marked by more poverty and alcohol abuse, he died prematurely of tuberculosis without fully developing his potential. Levitov is known primarily for his sketches (short works straddling the boundary between reportage and fiction) that portray the lives of the Russian underclasses--the...