In an 1895 article, an impassioned critic called for the literary resurrection of Ivan Afanas'evich Kushchevsky--critic, journalist, and author of one highly regarded novel, Nikolai Negorev, ili Blagopoluchnyi rossiianin (Nikolai Negorev, or the Successful Russian, 1871). The novel, which has been characterized by the well-known Russian literary historian D. S. Mirsky as an "unsurpassed picture of the change that transformed the Russia of Nicholas I into the almost anarchic Russia of the sixties," was in fact republished in 1917, and again during the Soviet period, and it was published in English translation in 1967. Yet, the renown the author and his work might have encountered never materialized. Instead, Kushchevsky found a home as a minor figure in Soviet literary encyclopedias, mentioned briefly as a writer of radical or revolutionary prose, and he was virtually ignored in most Western criticism.

Biographical details about Kushchevsky's life are scarce: his birth date is unknown, and...