One of the best-known writers of the 1820s and 1830s, Mikhail Nikolaevich Zagoskin started his literary career as a successful playwright and subsequently worked in several other prose genres, but he is remembered primarily as an historical novelist--the "Russian Walter Scott." His most acclaimed work is Iurii Miloslavskii (1829), the first full-fledged Russian historical novel, which enjoyed enormous popularity and secured Zagoskin's place in literary history. His other prominent piece is Roslavlev (1831), one of the earliest Russian novels about the War of 1812. A later collection of sketches by Zagoskin, Moskva i moskvichi (Moscow and Muscovites, 1842-1850), has a certain extraliterary importance, as it deals with various aspects of Moscow life in the past and present and is of interest to the local historian. All of Zagoskin's works are permeated with the so-called Russian orientation: ardent patriotism, love of things Russian, and disdain for slavish admiration of the West. Zagoskin's...