Koz'ma Petrovich Prutkov is the only fictional character in Russian literature who is referred to in critical works and bibliographies as if he were a real writer. The joint creation of Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his cousins the Zhemchuzhnikov brothers--Aleksei Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov, Vladimir Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov, and to a lesser extent, Aleksandr Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov--Prutkov was "born" in 1850 as a running family joke. As his creators imagined him, Prutkov was a civil servant and a literary dilettante, a terrible writer who celebrated the tsarist administrative machine in nearly every mode of fiction and nonfiction available to him. Prutkov's character allowed his creators scope for the parody of literary forms and movements and served as an outlet for expressing their animosity toward the tsarist bureaucracy and its cult of obedient conformism. Blithely unaware of his deficiencies as a writer, Prutkov published dozens of hilariously inept works that constitute one of the...