Susanne Fusso's ground-breaking re-evaluation of Mikhail Katkov “as a literary figure” who “enabled the creation of the great Russian novel” (20) reads in places like a Russian novel. Fusso's study has a solid structural arc; starting with Katkov's work as a literary critic who tied Russia's national status to the development of its literature, examining famous quarrels about Katkov's editorial interference, and ending with an appraisal of Katkov: “not as the murderer but as the inciter and inspirer of Russian literature” (242), the editor of a journal that “could not be equaled in stability and prestige” (243), and a patron of Russian literature, which he considered a vital component of Russia's political and historical importance (245). Finally, Fusso's beautifully written study offers a behind-the-scenes account of a man who not only “inspired vehement passions, both positive and negative,” but also published many of Russia's greatest nineteenth-century novels.

Initially an adjunct professor of philosophy at Moscow State University, Katkov turned to journalism after 1848. In 1856, he founded the Russian Herald (Russkii vestnik), a monthly journal Fedor Dostoevskii considered the major intellectual and artistic center of Russian public life (144) and the only one Lev Tolstoi subscribed to (163). In 1863, Katkov also became editor of the Moscow News (Moskovskie vedomosti).

Fusso begins her reappraisal of Katkov by examining his work as a literary critic and demonstrates that the conservative political views for which Katkov was known (and reviled) had deep roots in his study of the Russian language and his aspirations for Russia (6). Fusso traces Katkov's ideas about art and his sense “that he had superior knowledge of what belonged and did not belong in an artistic work” (37) to his translation/commentary of Heinrich Rötscher's Abhandlungen zur Philosophie der Kunst (Berlin, 1837), which respects the wholeness of artistic works but denies the artist any privilege as an interpreter.

Fusso's discussion of Katkov's polemic with Evgeniia Tur offers a foretaste of future conflicts with Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi (later chapters). When Katkov appended a disclaimer to Tur's article on Mme Svechina's writing without warning Tur, a member of his editorial board who oversaw the literature section, he sparked a public controversy that allowed him to be publicly defined by writers hostile to him (56).

Although Dostoevskii published his most celebrated novels in The Russian Herald—Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Devils (1871–2), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80)—his relationship with Katkov had a rocky start. First, Katkov rejected Dostoevskii's Village of Stepanchikova and its Inhabitants (1859). Then, during Dostoevskii's editorship of Time (Vremya, 1861–63), the two engaged in a series of journalistic polemics. Fusso discusses three: aesthetics, Aleksandr Pushkin, and the Polish uprising of 1863. Her analysis of their positions on Pushkin's work—for Katkov an “unfulfilled promise,” for Dostoevskii a “completed achievement” (124)—prepares the ground for her later examination of the 1880 Pushkin celebrations.

While re-examining Katkov's editorial interference in Dostoevskii's work, Fusso offers a savvy reading of Dostoevskii's famous letter pitching the idea for Crime and Punishment to Katkov. She convincingly argues that Dostoevskii not only used his knowledge of Katkov's editorial program to write his letter but that Katkov's writings are one source of Dostoevskii's novel. She even suggests that Katkov's criticism of the novel's Lazarus chapter may have improved the scene (151). Fusso ties Katkov's later refusal to publish Stavrogin's confession, the “At Tikhon's” chapter of The Devils, back to the Katkov-Dostoevskii polemics of the early 1860s. She argues that while “Dostoevsky's frank depiction of child molestation would have shocked most Russian readers of the time, including the censors” (156), Katkov may have objected to the scene more for detracting from his (not Dostoevskii's) view of the novel's anti-nihilist thrust. Katkov offered ridiculously low rates for Raw Youth, which Dostoevskii then published in Fatherland Notes, and Fusso wonders whether “the different character of A Raw Youth can be attributed to Dostoevsky's temporary departure from a partnership with Katkov that was fruitful and challenging, in both a positive and negative sense” (161).

Fusso also offers a new read on Katkov's refusal to publish Part 8 of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, whose earlier parts had appeared in the Russian Herald between 1875–77. Fusso convincingly argues that Tolstoi both absorbed and opposed many aspects of the journal's program. Although the aristocratic Tolstoi disdained Katkov and all journalistic discourse, Katkov viewed Tolstoi as the greatest hope of Russian literature, always acceded to his financial terms, and largely refrained from “the intrusive editorial practices that had plagued Tur, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky” (193). When Tolstoy submitted the novel's epilogue (later Part 8), however, Katkov demanded changes. Tolstoi refused and published Part 8 as a separate brochure. While the two broke publicly over Tolstoi's depiction of Russian volunteers traveling to Serbia to help “brother Slavs,” Fusso notes that “part 8 of Anna Karenina is only the most blatant and explicit attack on some of Katkov's most favored policies and programs to be found” (168–69). Nonetheless, Fusso reminds us that Turgenev credited Katkov for making him complete Fathers and Sons and notes that Katkov constantly pushed Tolstoi to continue Anna Karenina when he was ready to give up on it (201).

Fusso brings her account of Katkov's career full circle by discussing the Pushkin celebrations of 1880 and concludes that while no painter wanted to do Katkov's portrait, “Katkov had erected a monument to himself not made by hands. By nurturing, nagging, financing, inspiring, and sometimes infuriating the writers of Fathers and Sons, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov, he had played a vital role in creating Russian novels that would enter the world's literary canon” (240–41).