Literary history has not been kind to Vladimir Sollogub: his fame lasted but a decade while memories of his faded popularity amused the reading public throughout the late 1860s. Sollogub was viewed by many of his contemporaries in the 1840s as Russia's most popular belletrist--hailed by Vissarion Grigor'evich Belinsky after Lermontov's death as second only to Gogol. Both his short novels dealing with society, such as Bol'shoi svet (Great High Society, 1840), and his tales of the provinces, such as Aptekarsha (The Druggist's Wife, 1841), caused sensations in the Russia of Nicholas I; they were read by St. Petersburg society ladies and provincial petty landowners alike. Sollogub's 1845 Tarantas (Tarantas)--a novel-length work of mixed genres and narrative modes--became one of the earliest Russian best-sellers. The success of Tarantas, partly because of its appearance at the height of the Slavophile-Westernizer ideological controversy, compelled Belinsky to say the following in a letter...