Though early in life he looked backward for inspiration, Sergei Aksakov laid the groundwork for the great Russian realist novels of Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, and Leo Tolstoy. An early advocate of the neoclassical tradition of the late eighteenth century, he largely ignored the Romantic movement in the early decades of the nineteenth century and became one of the first writers of realistic prose in Russia. The clear, precise, and almost laconic style of his autobiographical novels, reminiscences, literary sketches, and works on hunting and fishing set the standard for Russian literary language for many decades. Enormously popular in the 1840s and 1850s, Aksakov became known as the "patriarch" of Russian literature in spite of writing his major works during the last fifteen years of his life. Perhaps the most Russian of the writers of his era, his works still retain their freshness and appeal, especially for...