Dmitrii Venevitinov's life was brilliant, impassioned, brief, and melancholy—in short, a virtual prototype of the Romantic writer's dream. He never reached his twenty-second birthday, dying of influenza while still in the initial—and, as a result, innocent—stage of his literary career. He thus became the center of a virtual hero cult upon his death in 1827. His written legacy is modest—a few dozen original poems, a series of Romantic translations, a few critical essays, some prose works, and letters. In literary affairs, his effect was more expansive, for he founded, along with Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky, the Obshchestvo liubomudriia (Society of Lovers of Wisdom, 1823-1825), a society devoted to expounding the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling in Russia. Venevitinov was the group's secretary as well as its leading poet. He was likewise identified with the Decembrist movement—a group of aristocrats intent on deposing...