Pavel Ivanovich Mel'nikov, who wrote fiction under the pseudonym Andrei Pechersky, is one of the most-controversial writers of Russian literature. While highly praised by many writers and critics, such as Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov (N. Shchedrin), who considered Mel'nikov "the explorer of Russian nationality," he was scorned by others--among them Leo Tolstoy, who accused Mel'nikov of a "false attitude towards the Russian people." The diversity of opinion can be attributed largely to Mel'nikov's work at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where between 1850 and 1866 he served as an official on special assignments connected with the matters of the Schism (a split in the Russian Orthodox Church that originated in the seventeenth-century rejection by the Old Believers of new church reforms). As a government official, Mel'nikov participated in the conversion of Old Believers to Russian Orthodoxy and in the closing of Old Believer cloisters in Nizhnii Novgorod province. In the 1850s...