The nineteenth-century Russian writer Melnikov-Pechersky is not well known in the West. Yet this contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy is a major literary figure who produced a series of fascinating sketches, stories, and tales about Russian provincial life as well as two epic-length novels concerned with Old Believers, In the Forests (V lesakh) and On the Hills (Na gorakh). How does one account for the relative obscurity of so important a writer outside his native land? First of all, very few translations of his works (no English ones whatsoever) have appeared in the West. Thus little biographical and critical material on Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov, who signed all his mature fiction “Andrei Pechersky,” is available in languages other than Russian. Second, in the USSR, as in prerevolutionary Russia, both general and scholarly assessments of Melnikov are frequently clouded by extraliterary considerations. In other words, the reception traditionally accorded him has been ambiguous, or at best lukewarm.