That Nikolai Nikolaevich Strakhov was always classified by his contemporaries as a "conservative" gives his life a special significance in Russian intellectual history. The myth of radical historiography has made him a victim of purposeful historical forgetfulness. In this respect he shares the fate of men like Aksakov, Danilevsky, and Katkov, indeed, of most Russian conservatives. Yet it is misleading to place him in such politically conservative company.

Strakhov was born in 1828, the same year as his great friend Leo Tolstoy and his great opponent Nikolai Chernyshevsky....