"In making her case for Katkov's editorial clout, Fusso performs a tremendous scholarly service. She elegantly translates key passages from essays by Katkov that have remained largely unexamined by Western critics, tracking his ideological evolution from moderate progressive to reactionary." - --Times Literary Supplement "Fusso's book concentrates on a man who played a very central role in the evaluation and publishing of some of the world's greatest and most influential novels. Katkov's wide reputation tended to picture him as a dyed-in-the-wool political reactionary. Fusso writes to correct this conventional notion and proves convincingly that the reality was far more complex. In the process she provides deeply interesting analysis and sheds light on an incredibly creative period of Russian history. This is a truly significant contribution to the fields of literature and history. The work is strikingly original and beautifully balanced.

" --Irwin Weil, author of From the Cincinnati Reds to the Moscow Reds "Fusso analyzes at great length and in tremendous detail Katkov's ideological program as it developed and as it was expressed in the pages of the Russian Herald , and demonstrates multiple ways in which the novels of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky engage with and respond to this ideological program. The book's perspective is entirely new and makes a welcome and significant scholarly intervention in the study of nineteenth-century Russian literature. It is a work of impressive scholarship." --Kate Holland, author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and the Problem of Genre in the 1870s "Fusso shows in this fascinating study how Katkov as editor dedicated his life both to the propagation of his beliefs and to the promotion of Russian literature. Among other things, her book is an account of the reception of Katkov from his own day to the present time as reflective of deep cultural currents in Russia." -- Russian Review.