The most popular Russian prose fiction writer in the 1820s and 1830s, Alexander Bestuzhev (pseudonym Marlinsky) was also a literary critic, poet, military hero, and revolutionary. This study attempts to reestablish Bestuzhev's position in Russian cultural history while at the same time introducing a forgotten literary icon to a new audience.

Lewis Bagby places Bestuzhev within the fashionable trends of early European Romanticism and analyzes his Byronic literary persona intricately connected to his military career, the literary polemics of the day, fiction writing, and political...