With his three novels, two historical publications, and wide-ranging miscellany, Matvei Komarov became Russia's first best-selling literary figure. From the late 1770s through the October Revolution of 1917 his works were issued in more than thirty editions, a remarkable achievement for eighteenth-century Russian letters. Komarov did not consider himself an author, and it would be stretching facts to say that he "wrote" any of the works that were published under his name. Komarov can best be described as an editor, compiler, and adapter, whose real strength lay in transforming popular legends, adventure stories, and folktales into publishable works of literature. Taking advantage of the open form of the novel, he combined the disparate sources at his disposal to forge one of the first working idioms for Russian prose fiction. In the process he acquired a readership that probably has never been surpassed by any other Russian writer and helped...