Critical interest in Nikolai Polevoi in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has focused on the same aspects of his career. In the nineteenth century, though he was regularly accounted a publicist, a critic, a novelist and short-story writer, a versifier, an historian, and a man of letters in general, Polevoi was chiefly known as a journalist--the outstanding journalist of his day, in the opinion of the most important Russian critic of the period, Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky. In the twentieth century as well Polevoi has been most highly valued for his journalistic accomplishments, particularly for the critical essays and reviews he published in almost every issue of the celebrated journal he founded, Moskovskii telegraf (The Moscow Telegraph), and for the role these articles played in the development of Russian Romanticism and prose. Today he is also esteemed for his early contribution to the genre of critical biography and...