Vsevolod Garshin made his literary debut in the twilight decades of the nineteenth century, when Russian culture was at a crossroads. In Russia as in Europe, the era of the great realist novel was waning; Leo Tolstoy had essentially given up on the genre, while the other great novelists soon passed from the scene--Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1881 and Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev in 1883. The emphasis on utilitarian art in the 1860s and the Populists' idealization of the peasant in the 1870s gave way to a renewed interest in individual psychology and the cultivation of a personal style more suited to the climate of political reaction, anxiety, and social fragmentation that followed the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Small genres--short stories, sketches, and novellas--became dominant, as writers turned increasingly toward concise depictions of personal experience and incident rather than broad canvases of family and social history. Garshin emerged from this environment...