Modernist prose writer, poet, illustrator, and memoirist Aleksei Remizov began his long and productive career amid the social instability and cultural renaissance of Silver Age St. Petersburg and ended it in the world of the Russian émigré community in Paris. Throughout his life Remizov, a modern mythmaker, proved single-minded in his mission of renewing what he called "the worn-out word" and painstakingly retrieved material from folk and medieval texts. Both an archaist and an innovator in his approach, he sought to overcome the categorical and hierarchical binary oppositions that dominated previous Russian literature: old and new, written and oral, literary and nonliterary. His many literary autobiographies and memoirs, written later in emigration, also provide a cumulative chronicle of his life and times. In his History of Russian Literature, literary historian D. S. Mirsky offers a sustained appraisal of Remizov's contribution to the culture of his time...