Aleksandr Vasil'evich Druzhinin, famous in his time as the author of the enormously popular sentimental tale Polin'ka Saks (1847), was also an influential literary critic and polemicist, a widely read essayist and humorist, an unrivaled popularizer and translator of English literature and, for a time, Leo Tolstoy's closest adviser. Druzhinin is best known today as chief defender of "pure art" in a struggle that began in the mid 1850s with radical literary critics. Though ostensibly about aesthetics, this battle, coming just at the end of thirty years of oppressive rule by Czar Nicholas I, was in effect the opening act in the protracted social struggle that culminated in the October Revolution of 1917.

Druzhinin was born into a somewhat atypical family for Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century. His father, Vasilii F. Druzhinin, was an official in the postal treasury. He rose from obscurity through the so-called...