The poet Nikolai Kliuev cast himself in the role of insistent representative of rural peasant life, religion, and the Russian North. Kliuev made a poetic career of adopting a confrontational stance toward the modern world, castigating both the "godless" Decadence of prerevolutionary Russia and, later, the atheism and industrialization of Communism. Yet, paradoxically, he created some of the most innovative modernist verse of the Silver Age. He rooted his poetry in peasant traditions and legends but absorbed much from his Symbolist patrons and from a lifetime of avid reading. His complex poetry is a fascinating and highly unusual mixture; it is both conservative and radical, fervently religious and explicitly homoerotic, folk-poetic and avant-garde. Mentor to his fellow peasant poet Sergei Aleksandrovich Esenin, with whom he had a highly fraught relationship, Kliuev, unlike his younger colleague, remained faithful to a peasant worldview and his religious faith, even in the...