Though a pillar of the official Soviet literary establishment for most of her long life and a staunch supporter of the Communist Party line, Marietta Shaginian was a truly talented and versatile writer whose voluminous contributions to Soviet letters reflect a technical mastery of her craft, an intellectual breadth and sophistication, and an insatiable curiosity about the world. Shaginian wrote works in nearly every literary genre (both fictional and nonfictional) and may be considered a founder of a new literary form--the Soviet-era ocherk (essay)--and arguably one of its best practitioners. Shaginian began her professional career as a newspaper journalist but first achieved literary fame as a symbolist poet. With the advent of the 1917 October Revolution, she abandoned her mystical idealism and allied herself firmly with the Soviets. As a privileged member of the intelligentsia, Shaginian struggled to shed her literary reputation as a bourgeois idealist and gain...