Abstract
<p> This translation makes available the first bestselling novel in Russia, Faddei Bulgarin's social satire <italic>Ivan Vyzhigin</italic> (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 noted in the Introduction, <italic>Ivan Vyzhigin</italic> opens a window onto what Russians were reading between the late eighteenth century and the 1917 Revolution. Along with the Introduction, annotations provide literary, historical, and cultural context. </p>