Avdot'ia Iakovlevna Panaeva's significance as a writer of fiction has long been eclipsed by her literary and artistic memoirs, written toward the end of her life in the late 1880s and detailing the lives of the writers associated with the leading liberal "thick" journal of the mid nineteenth century, Sovremennik (The Contemporary). Panaeva played an integral part in the establishment and ongoing support of this journal, which served as a medium for the naturalistic and democratic writings of such authors as Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Dmitrii Vasil'evich Grigorovich, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov. In addition to feeding, supporting, and sometimes housing the contributors, Panaeva edited manuscripts and wrote her own short stories and novels that were published in the journal under the male pseudonym "N. Stanitsky." All of her works, which follow a naturalistic style typical of the period, revolve around the problems of...