What special possibilities for literary creation arise in periods of rapid transition from one set of social institutions to another? This book examines four such periods in Russian history: the era of Peter the Great and his successors, the epoch of the Great Reforms of the 1860's, the decades following the Russian Revolution, and the period of social and political upheaval in the late 1980's and the 1990's. Since the eighteenth century, the idea of revolutionary social change has been a central element in the Russian understanding of history--in what may be called the historical mythology...