A central figure in the dispute between the Innovators (those who sought to render the Russian literary language more harmonious through Western borrowings and stylizations) and the Archaizers (those who wanted a return to a more traditional Russian vocabulary and style) was certainly Prince Petr Andreevich Viazemsky. A man of many talents (critic, polemicist, poet, archivist, letter writer, translator, and government worker), Viazemsky left an indelible imprint on the development of Russian Romantic literature. By spirit closer to the French literature of the eighteenth century, he nonetheless defended the spirit of Romanticism, even if he did not always follow it in practice. By a strictly literary definition, his poetry should generally be classified as pre-Romantic, or Sentimental. His later poetry, however, written long after the wane of Romantic verse in Russia and the co-requisite growth of the Realistic novel as created by such writers as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and...