Vasilii Botkin is an important, if rather neglected, figure in the history of nineteenth-century Russian culture. He was the author of several pieces of travel writing. He also forcefully articulated a view of art as an end in itself that was widely held by leading Russian writers and literary critics in the late 1850s until utilitarian critics, such as Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobroliubov, succeeded in marginalizing it. Yet, Botkin's literary output was not voluminous, nor, for the most part, was it highly original. Apart from his travel writing and a small corpus of literary criticism, his output consists mainly of brief reviews of books and music, and translations and articles based on foreign works. Botkin's importance is therefore attributed to the centrality of his role in Russian intellectual life--in particular in the circle of the zapadniki (Westernizers)--from the late 1830s to the early 1860s...