American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Modern Slavic Literatures by Vasa D. MihailovichReview by: Donald FangerThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp. 451-452Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/305642 .

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Reviews 451

tic though it is, a very shrewd and arresting notion is that of consciousness of time versus neglect of it as a potential classifying element in the 19th-century novel in Russia (perhaps everywhere?). While only tentatively sketched out, it whets the appetite for a more thorough test, even while warning flags go up in the back of one's head against all analytic panaceas.

A critical standpoint--a set of defined novelistic values, and judgments demon- strably flowing from it in mutual concord-these are not consistently in evidence. We are told pretty precisely, though we may of course disagree with consternation, what set of properties makes Lermontov's novel accomplished and valuable (pene- tration of the hero's inner experience; timelessness and depth of portraiture; status as a "remarkable whole on its own terms," backed by a Belinskij rhapsody re flowers and seeds; wealth of meaning and implications, profound vitality), and what other set of properties does the same for Dead Souls or Oblomov. We are not told very clearly how far these sets do or should overlap and what master set can or should be glimpsed through all of these and others. Is it too captious to say that discernment and opinion on this matter alone entitle a critic to speak, as Freeborn does, of "the" Russian novel? Here is one important province in which the device of "Studies in ..." does not serve the author well. For while the generic quest can be, and often has been, driven much too far, this scheme allows him to evade it more completely than is sound.

Walter Arndt, Dartmouth College

Vasa D. Mihailovich, comp. and ed. Modern Slavic Literatures. Vol. 1. Russian Litera- ture. (Library of Literary Criticism.) New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. xii, 424, $15.00.

This tome deals with 69 Russian writers of the 20th century, among them for some reason Cexov and Lev Tolstoj. Aside from a brief introduction, the book consists entirely of excerpted passages from a broad spectrum of critics, reviewers, and mem- oirists-Russian, American, and European. It is intended, the introduction states, "as a reference tool for students, scholars, librarians, and researchers" and represents "the first such compendium on Russian literature in any language." The novelty in question seems indisputable. The nearest relatives would seem to be such essays in montak as Veresaev's Gogol' v Uizni and Aronson and Rejzer's Literaturnye salony i kru'ki. But the relationship is not close, since the former illuminates a single writer and the latter a single literary cultural phenomenon, and both pursue the aims of more conventional books in spite of their innovative format.

Is Modern Slavic Literatures, volume 1, a reference tool? Certainly it will be a boon to harried term-paper writers, containing as it does many eminently quotable statements which can be cited to imply that the student has done extensive critical reading. How it can serve scholars, librarians, and researchers is harder to see, in the absence of any editorial context whatever. There are-apparently on principle (but the principle is never discussed)-no biographical or bibliographical summaries for the writers represented, just as no editorial identification is supplied for the critics quoted. Pieces of arguments, opinions, and observations (some acute, some not) float haphazardly, unrelated to the works from which they have been excised, the tendencies of those who produced them, or the controversies of which they may have formed part. What, for example, might an uninitiated reader make of the ten pages devoted to Mandel'stam, which contain four paragraphs by Gumilev (on Kamen'), two by Zirmunskij (who speaks in 1916 of "the whole path" of Mandel'stam's devel-

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452 Slavic and East European Journal

opment), one by N. L. Stepanov ("His verses are characterized by high mastery and verbal perfection"), two by Tarasenkov, two by Selivanovskij ("He has no social instincts or interests"), two by Sergej Makovskij ("Mandel'stam is continually symbolic"), one by Poggioli, four by trenburg, two by Nilsson, one each by Isaiah Berlin and Axmatova, two each by Clarence Brown and Victor Terras, three by Sidney Monas, one from the Times Literary Supplement (wondering what Ho Chi Minh must have thought of the Russian poet when they met in 1923), and two by Vasa D. Mihailovich ("obviously the definitive view of him and his literary achievement is yet to come")? Mandel'stam is a particularly difficult specimen, but the same methodological difficulties can be seen in the other sections.

The book would seem to be most legitimately useful to those who do not need it, that is, to people who have some knowledge of the writers dealt with. Such people may well have read the articles and chapters quoted, but there is always a chance that a statement read too long ago, forgotten, or unnoticed will register afresh. Best of all may be to regard the volume as a source of material for examinations in modern Russian literature, where students might be given passages at random and asked to do what the compiler has not: explain, and comment critically.

Donald Fanger, Harvard University

J. G. Garrard, ed. The Eighteenth Century in Russia. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973. xiii, 356, $21.00.

This Anglo-American collection of 14 essays is oriented toward intellectual history. Only two of the essays deal with specifically literary themes. Harold B. Segel's "Clas- sicism and Classical Antiquity in Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Rus- sian Literature" polemicizes against the thesis that European-oriented Russian literature began with Neoclassicism and that Neoclassicism reigned supreme until Sentimentalism took over in the late 1770's. To a certain extent this is a straw man, for only the most superficial of surveys would give such a monolithic picture after the work of scholars like Gukovskij, Berkov, Tschiiewskij, and Serman. But Segel's formulation of the state of Russian literature during the period under analysis is quite felicitous: "The flattening of perspective produced by telescoping resulted ... in a curious kind of classicism, an amalgam of French high classicism, seventeenth- century prdcieux poetry, late German Baroque, and the po6sie 164gre of late classicism and the rococo" (p. 51). He also argues convincingly that translations from Latin and especially Greek did not begin to flower until the second half of the century, and then under German-not French-influence.

More provocative is the other literary contribution, "Novikov's Naturalized Spectator" by G. Gareth Jones, a reappraisal of Novikov's Truten' which attempts to maximize the influence of The Spectator on the Russian journal experiment. Jones maintains that the Spectator-type periodical, a genre he claims Novikov fully under- stood, had no definite program, that it did not serve as a mouthpiece for the editor's views. In fact, he sees Novikov's journal as "an act of collaboration rather than defiance" (p. 153) and dismisses the long-accepted view of the antagonistic relation- ship between the journalist and his Empress "as a necessary part of a picture formed a century ago of Novikov as an early representative of Russian populism ... and carefully cultivated since then by populist-minded literary historians" (p. 153). Equally provocative, and in the end more convincing, is In-Ho L. Ryu's essay, "Mos- cow's Freemasons and the Rosicrucian Order," in which he reinterprets Novikov's role in the Russian Masonic movement and lays the foundation for a reinterpreta-

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