The Victorian era remains a great source of fascination for the modern reader. English-language bookstores the world over abound with biographies of eminent Victorians, treatises on aspects of Victorian life and stylized crime novels set in the late 19th century. The trend has now reached our shores, sometimes with unexpected results.

The publishing house Olma Group has issued a book in its series titled "The Library of Publisher Angel de Coitier" (at least that's how I reconstruct this mock-foreign pen name from its Cyrillic version). This particular book contains an early Russian translation of "Alice in Wonderland" -- an interesting detail in the reception of Lewis Carroll in Russia, though somewhat surprising, given the existence of several superior translations. But the most interesting part is the "publisher's" foreword, which debunks the myth of Carroll's pedophilia. A noble task -- were it not an extremely kitschy retelling of an article by Alexandra Borisenko and Nina Demurova (the best Russian translator of Carroll), published several years ago in "Foreign Literature" magazine and widely available on the Internet. Careful examination of the two texts reveals that Coitier had no other source of information about Carroll whatsoever; he either quotes the article verbatim without any references or adds some jargon expression and exclamation marks. It's a good thing Coitier is not a real person.

Another publishing house, Molodaya Gvardia, has issued a new book in its popular series "Everyday Life," this time "Everyday Life of Victorian England" by Tanya Dittrich. Even in a popular book, the absence of an index of names, footnotes and any indication of the sources consulted is somewhat baffling. More baffling are lengthy quotes from fiction as proof of the author's points, apparently in Dittrich's own translation (because Soviet translations of English classics were never so bad), and, again, without any indication of their origin. Add to that a very liberal understanding of the Victorian era, which, according to Dittrich, accommodates Jonathan Swift (who died in 1745) and P.G. Wodehouse (whose literary career spanned from 1902 to 1975). Queen Victoria, of course, reigned from 1837 to 1901. Dittrich also routinely mixes people up, such as Beatrix Potter of Peter Rabbit fame and Beatrice Potter Webb, the socialist and ardent defender of Soviet Communism.

The Victorians have lots to tell us. It is sad that the current state of Russian popular nonfiction results in such wonderful material being rendered so unsatisfactorily.