Stepan Shevyrev was a poet, critic, and literary scholar who occupied a prominent place in Moscow intellectual circles throughout the reign of Nicholas I. He led the sedentary existence of a successful critic and academic; most of his life was, as a consequence, uneventful. In the late 1820s Shevyrev was the preeminent theorist of the Liubomudry (Lovers of Wisdom), a secret society that espoused an anti-Enlightenment Romantic philosophy inspired by the thought of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling. Subsequently Shevyrev embraced Count Sergei Semenovich Uvarov's theory of Official Nationality, interpreting it in the same spirit of philosophical Romanticism. Together with his friend and colleague Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, with whom he is often paired, Shevyrev was a leading exponent of Uvarov's doctrine. Shevyrev and Pogodin's Official Nationalism should be distinguished, however, from the Slavophilism of Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov, Ivan Vasil'evich Kireevsky, and Konstantin Sergeevich Aksakov, to which it was contemporaneous...