Apollon Grigor'ev, considered the best nineteenth-century Russian literary critic, was also a significant poet, memoirist, and translator. He was the first to appreciate Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin's universal genius, to recognize Aleksandr Nikolaevich Ostrovsky's creation of a Russian national theater, to appreciate Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol's significance as a thinker, to understand Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev's idiosyncratic realism, and to appreciate Leo Tolstoy's uncompromising objectivity as seen in his early works. Although Grigor'ev died before the great novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky appeared, he recognized Dostoevsky's distinctive talent in Zapiski iz podpol'ia (Notes from Underground, 1864) and, as Dostoevsky recalled in an 1869 letter to Strakhov, Grigor'ev encouraged him, "Keep writing just this way!" Grigor'ev rejected the aesthetics and critical methods of the progressive Westernizers, or Revolutionary Democrats (Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, Dmitrii Ivanovich Pisarev), and therefore has been viewed as conservative. But he also criticized the positions of...