Few literary reputations have been damaged as severely by readers' selective reception as that of Mikhail Prishvin. Reduced to the image of a "singer of Russian nature" specializing in hunting and animal stories for mostly juvenile audiences, Prishvin's philosophical depth and stylistic brilliance are still waiting for full critical assessment both in his homeland and abroad. Certainly, there are exceptions to the stereotypical mode of reading: his semifictional accounts of the eternal human search for truth and togetherness evoked enthusiasm from such literary authorities as Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok, Maksim Gor'ky, and John Updike. But once Prishvin had been defined by normative Soviet literary history as a "children's writer," his name never fully recovered from that cliché, not even after the sensational publication of his uncensored diaries during perestroika, more than three decades after his passing. To this day, the majority of Russian readers have not fully embraced...