Although no less an authority than Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky acknowledged him to be Russia's "first" novelist, Narezhny has been given remarkably little credit for the important pioneering role he played in the development of the novel as a literary genre in early-nineteenth-century Russia. Instead he has been made to dwell in relative obscurity within the annals of Russian literary history, overlooked in the long shadows cast by contemporary giants such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Iur'evich Lermontov, and Nikolai Gogol. Peculiarities of fate, as much as critical biases in favor of major writers, help to account for this lack of recognition for Narezhny's artistic achievement. For one thing, Narezhny was born in the Ukraine rather than Russia proper, and thus he wrote a coarse, humorous brand of prose fiction that might have been quite typical for writers who were "Little" Russians but was largely unusual, unfamiliar, and thus unsettling...