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Although Russia's major Golden Age writers have had numerous book-length studies devoted to them by distinguished American slavists, no Western collection of essays has examined in comprehensive yet rigorous fashion the many literary pathways by which Russians imagined and revised their modern identity as a people. In this collection of important new essays, poetic works by Derzhavin, Krylov, Batiushkov, Pushkin, Girboedov, Lermontov, and, in a novel interaction, Baratynsky and Russia's first woman poet, Pavlova, are resituated within the force fields of contradictory cultural pressures, as are the best-selling prose narratives of Narezhnyi, Karamzin, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, Viazemsky, Senkovsky, Gogol, and Pushkin.