sentences:  Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes.Pikul's best-selling 1978 novel "At the Last Frontier" was a dramatized telling of Rasputin's influence over the Russian imperial court.Richard Stites says he was "a name hardly known to literary scholars but the most widely read author in the Soviet Union from the seventies to today [i.e., 1991]... Pikul's works were wildly popular