Although he wrote few original works and no novels, plays, or stories, Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov has been justly acclaimed as a towering figure of the Russian Enlightenment, equaled only by the Empress Catherine the Great, Mikhail Lomonosov, Aleksandr Radishchev, and perhaps Nikolai Karamzin. As a philanthropist, as an editor, and above all as a publisher, Novikov had an enormous impact upon Russia's dawning secular intellectual life. Between 1765 and his arrest and incarceration in 1792, Novikov was responsible for bringing into print hundreds of new titles, and in his prime during the mid 1780s, his publishing empire in Moscow was producing nearly 40 percent of all titles generated by Russia's civil publishing houses. His undaunted energy on behalf of a fledgling intellectual world with few literary markets, along with the fact that his career was cut short by an act of political repression, secured for Novikov virtual lionization, at times almost...