John Randolph's intelligently conceived, convincingly argued, and beautifully crafted book invites its readers to reconsider a subject that has been covered by renowned scholars such as Isaiah Berlin, E. H. Carr, Martin Malia, Aileen Kelly, and Lydia Ginzburg (to name just a few) and, more recently, by the playwright Tom Stoppard. What more can we learn about Mikhail Bakunin, Vissarion Belinsky, Nikolai Stankevich, and other giants of nineteenth-century Russian thought? A great deal, as Randolph makes clear. He accomplishes this historiographic breakthrough in two ways. First, he puts at the center of his account the Bakunin estate, Priamukhino, and the lives and ideas of the people who lived there and those who passed through. Second, he carefully analyzes the vast Bakunin archive of letters, plays, poetry books, memory books, and diaries to illuminate the interaction between gender, ideas, and home life within this highly educated group of noble men and women. From these new perspectives, the famous Russian idealism of the 1830s reemerges as the product of a self-conscious effort to reconcile philosophy with private life in general and with the dramas of the Bakunin family in particular.