Vsevolod Vladimirovich Krestovsky was a remarkably well-known and popular writer in his own time, a fact that makes more interesting not only his subsequent obscurity but also the resurgence of his works in late-twentieth-century Russia. Because Krestovsky was an acute observer and because he wrote much like a reporter, his works provide an interesting record of his epoch and also serve as an important reflection of the populist fervor that ran through the Russia of his day and that has been appearing once again in modern Russia as a product of similarly unsettled times. Although Krestovsky is generally considered a writer of historical fiction, unlike most writers in this genre Krestovsky did not write about earlier historical periods. Instead, he wrote about the period in which he lived and about those events that were taking place even as he was describing them in his notebooks. His major works...