Ivan Vyzhigin

<p><b>With his translation, Michael R. Katz makes available the first bestselling novel in Russia, Faddei Bulgarin''s social satire </b><b><i>Ivan Vyzhigin</i></b><b> (1829). </b>The novel is an amusing picaresque filled with local color and comical portraits, narrated by its hero, an orphaned peasant who relates his many adventures as a young man. The book is remarkable for its accurate descriptions of nineteenth-century Russian day-to-day reality: the clothes, food, surroundings, and characters that Ivan Vyzhigin encounters. Its publication ushered in the age of prose in nineteenth-century Russian literature, and Bulgarin was hailed by Pushkin as a major prose writer. </p> <p>As William Mills Todd III notes in his introduction, <i>Ivan Vyzhigin</i> opens a window onto what Russians were reading between the late eighteenth century and the 1917 Revolution. Along with Todd''s introduction, Katz''s annotations provide literary, historical, and cultural context.</p>