Ivan Vyzhigin

With his translation, Michael R. Katz makes available the first bestselling novel in Russia, Faddei Bulgarin's social satire Ivan Vyzhigin (1829). 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.

As William Mills Todd III notes in his introduction, Ivan Vyzhigin 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.

Michael R. Katz received his doctorate from Oxford. He taught at Williams College, the University of Texas at Austin, and Middlebury College. He has written two monographs and has translated more than twenty-five Russian novels into English.

William Mills Todd III is Research Professor and Harry Tuchman Levin Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Harvard University and author of Fiction and Society in the Age of Pushkin.

Katz provides an accurate and stylistically sensitive translation of an important novel. Todd's introduction offers an erudite outline of the novel's historical and literary background.

John Randolph, author of The House in the Garden:

Michael R. Katz's translation is excellent, and William Mills Todd III's introduction provides an authoritative, informative perspective on Faddei Bulgarin's work and its place in Russian literary history. This is what Tom Jones might look like in the Russian empire.