In the history of Russian culture it would be difficult to find a figure more enigmatic than Pavel Katenin. A member of a secret revolutionary society, the Soiuz Spaseniia (Union of Salvation), he remained a "Decembrist without December," for on the day of the 1825 uprising he was far from the scene of the action. A man of broad education and a sharp mind, he nevertheless seemed to many of his contemporaries to be a literary retrograde. His artistic views frequently provoked heated polemics in literary circles. Late in the 1820s, under the general rubric of Razmyshleniia i razbory (Considerations and Critiques) his aesthetic articles were published in the Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette). These articles reflected the contradictions of the epoch in which Romanticism lost its leading role, yielding to Realism. Katenin was an innovative writer and experimenter who, from his first steps into Russian literature, devoted himself to...