Konstantin Fofanov wrote during one of the bleakest periods in Russian poetry, when poetic figures were largely eclipsed by giants of Russian prose such as Leo Tolstoy and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Although Fofanov's name fell into relative obscurity in subsequent years, an entire generation of late-nineteenth-century Russian poets was once referred to as belonging to the "Fofanov period." Fofanov was as prolific as some of the most active Russian poets. His total output exceeds two thousand works, consisting of lyric and narrative poetry as well as dramatic scenes and plays in verse. While his poetry was identified with different, often opposing, literary camps, he frequently wrote in the spirit of the civic poetry of the 1860s and 1870s. The majority of his verse, however, belongs to the school of "pure art," which arose in the 1880s and 1890s as a reaction to calls for social consciousness and utilitarianism...