Author of prose fiction, critical essays, autobiography, ethnographical and historical studies, as well as a considerable and substantive literary correspondence, Nadezhda Sokhanskaia became widely known (as Kokhanovskaia) in the late 1850s and early 1860s for her historical and fictional narratives. Deeply religious, with a profound attachment to her native Malorussia (present-day Ukraine), Sokhanskaia maintained close ties with the Slavophiles, who acclaimed her remarkable command and reworking of the Russian language, as well as her skill in depicting the life and people of southern Russia. Written in the last, dark years of Tsar Nicholas I's rule and the early, turbulent years of Alexander II's reign--the age of the Great Reforms--Sokhanskaia's "positive" depictions of the regional and patriarchal life of Old Russia and her defense of the Russian Orthodox Church were attacked by liberal and civic critics. The latter largely defined her subsequent reputation until the present. The project of...