P. V. Bykov, writing a biographical sketch of Mikhail Larionovich Mikhailov for a 1913 edition of Mikhailov's collected works, opined that it would be hard to find another writer who had been so quickly forgotten. Mikhailov's rapid descent into oblivion was aided by an official ban on the mention of his name in print following his 1862 deportation to a Siberian labor camp, where he died in 1865. While Mikhailov's reputation as a martyr flourished among late-nineteenth-century populists, the prohibition against mentioning him in print insured that even the better-than-average reader remained more or less ignorant of him right up until the revolution. Another salient fact in Mikhailov's life story was passed over in silence for even longer: his open love affair with Liudmila Shelgunova, the wife of Mikhailov's good friend, the progressive man of letters Nikolai Vasil'evich Shelgunov. This liaison was glossed over until 1929, when it was one of the...