A noted authority on Russian history, Schapiro undertakes an intellectual biography of Turgenev, bringing together the writer's personal, political, and artistic concerns to capture the full dimension of this enigmatic figure.

"This ... volume includes a synopsis of the salient features of culture in the Russian empire, two surveys of half a century of Soviet Russian literature, analyses of socialist realism and of "Dissonant Voices" in Soviet literature, and six essays on five individual figures - Boris Pasternak, Olga Ivinskaya, Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Siniavskii ("Pushkin, Gogol, and the devil"), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn." -- Review.