Petr Pletnev lived a long life and was fortunate to have known most of the great men of nineteenth-century Russian literature, including the most famous, Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. His own contribution to Russian belles lettres, both as a poet and as a critic, is fairly modest. Indeed, he himself had few illusions about his poetic talent and believed that his immortality would instead be assured through his friendships with his more talented contemporaries. Pletnev did publish many poems in various early-nineteenth-century periodicals; some of them were included by Iakov Karlovich Grot in his three-volume edition of Pletnev's work. His other works, which appeared in several periodicals between 1820 and 1860, have been mostly forgotten. A complete edition of his works has never been published. As a critic he likewise failed to leave his mark on the genre, which was just beginning to take root in Russia. After Pushkin's...