Countess Evdokiia Rostopchina, who sometimes used the pseudonyms Iasnovidiashchaia (Clairvoyant) and Russkaia zhenshchina (A Russian Woman), was one of the most popular female poets of nineteenth-century Russia. Undoubtedly talented, she used her wealth, beauty, and prominent position to advance her literary career. She ran a stylish salon and knew Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov, and other leading writers and publishers. She was an insider in a period when serious literature was dominated by the nobility, when rich and beautiful women could exploit Romantic conventions to enjoy considerable influence. Like many of the poets who outlived Pushkin and Lermontov, Rostopchina found herself out of date in the 1850s, when leading utilitarian critics saw her, at best, as the author of a few unpublished poems about the exiled participants in the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825. Rostopchina's many prose and dramatic works, uncompromisingly Romantic in the age of emerging realism, never...