The career of the popular and prolific novelist, journalist, editor, and translator Aleksandr Konstantinovich Sheller was intrinsically linked to the hopes and disappointments of the 1860s. Seeing himself as the chronicler of the lives of the "new people" of the time, the "men of the sixties," Sheller (writing under the pseudonym A. Mikhailov) focused his attention in his more than one hundred novels and stories on the strivings of this generation for self-improvement and self-transformation. Avidly read by the young people of the 1860s and 1870s, Sheller's works regularly received positive reviews from the critics only early in his career; they soon started criticizing his heavy-handed moralizing, artificiality, and lack of originality. But Sheller's popularity with the reading public endured. Addressing the question of why "over three decades the best, most advanced, thinking people have kept engrossing themselves in Sheller's novels and still consider him among the most...