In Aleksandr Pushkin's circle of writers, where every individual played a specific historical role, Aleksandr Ivanovich Turgenev occupied a special place. His extraordinary journalistic ability enabled him to convey many profound opinions about Russian history and European reality, about distinguishing characteristics of literature at home and abroad, and about the great contemporaries he met in the course of his life. The name Aleksandr Turgenev holds a prominent position in the history and literature of the first half of the nineteenth century. A friend of the great writers Pushkin, Vasilii Andreevich Zhukovsky, Petr Andreevich Viazemsky, and Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin and a brother of the Decembrist Nikolai Turgenev, Aleksandr Turgenev was an active public administrator who passionately promoted all of the most liberal ideas of his time. An avid collector of Russian historical antiquities, he was a man of letters who corresponded with illustrious contemporaries such as Johann Wolfgang von...