In this book, Zinaida Afanasievna Vengerova, a once famous literary critic, whose importance for the turn of the century European intellectual world is no longer sufficiently appreciated, receives her first full length systematic study. Her intellectual exploration at the turn of the 19th century brought her into contact with Symbolist ideas from several European countries, and she used her profound understanding of these different currents of Symbolism to fashion for herself an ambassadorial role between Western Europe and Russia. In many critical studies she introduced the Russian intellectual world to a wide spectrum of Western European literature, art and thought, including Baudelaire, Maeterlinck, and the French Symbolist poets, Pre-Raphaelite and Expressionist art, and the thought of Nietzsche. As a regular contributor to the