As both a creative writer and an essayist, Andrei Bitov superbly represents the Russian public intellectual of a special generation. He is old enough to have some recollections of World War II. He experienced postwar reconstruction in Leningrad and the promise of a bright future for Soviet youth. In the spirit of technological progress he chose a career path in the sciences, specifically in geology, but eventually abandoned the field for the life of a writer. Bitov recognized his avocation in the atmosphere of Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev's "Thaw"; he suffered at the hands of the censors during Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's "Stagnation"; and he finally achieved full public voice in the years of Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev's glasnost. Bitov's published works span more than four decades, and their perspectives encompass an even broader chronology of a "thinking person's" life, as experienced during Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union through post-Communist Russia. Bitov's...