On the merits of his only book of poems, first published in 1885, Semen Nadson is generally accepted as the defining Russian poet of the 1880s. Nadson, moreover, has secured a lasting reputation among a devoted readership whose cult-like veneration of the poet--initiated during his lifetime--is still practiced today. Despite this success, critics have long considered Nadson a minor poet of questionable aesthetic significance. In its didacticism and social idealism Nadson's poetry belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of Russian civic verse, but it also displays the important influence of an earlier lyric tradition of Romantic agony. The facts of the poet's biography (he was a tubercular who died at the age of twenty-four) instilled Nadson's readership with an unswerving faith in the mimetic realism of his lyrics devoted to personal suffering, in spite of their dependence on poetic clichés. Since his death, Nadson's poetry and popular cult...