Modern Russian literature has two "first" epochs: secular literature's rapid rise in the eighteenth century and Alexander Pushkin's Golden Age in the early nineteenth. In the shadow of the latter, Russia's eighteenth-century culture was relegated to an obscurity hardly befitting its actually radical legacy. And yet the eighteenth century maintains an undeniable hold on the Russian historical imagination to this day. Luba Golburt's book is the first to document this paradox. In formulating its self-image, the culture of the Pushkin era and after wrestled far more with the meaning of the...