William James in Russian Culture by Joan Delaney Grossman; Ruth RishchinReview by: Avril PymanThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 2006), pp. 144-145Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4214229 .

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144 SEER, 84, I, 2oo6

efforts to reassert cultural and linguistic identity in order to enter the European community.

Despite its high ambition and the authors' stated position in-between the East and the West, the project seems largely untouched by the complexities and conflicted reality of the region. The legacy of socialism creates an urgency that can hardly be underestimated in any explorations of Eastern Europe. And it is socialism which the budding scholars of post-socialist studies fail to address in theoretical and historical terms.

When Eastern Europeans look West, they see cultural spaces with not only contemporary, i.e. post-socialist, post-Communist or post-authoritarian, but also complex historical dimensions. When American academics of Eastern European origin (or those with an interest in the region) look East, they see themselves in the mirror of their intellectual formation. While promising engagement with a critique of ethnocentric politics, the volume remains anchored in the older and predictable geographies of identities. But perhaps this internal conflict in itself could be productive in creating an intellectual opening for much needed discussion of the Eastern European question and for recalibrating the Western gaze.

Cultural Studies E. CHMIELEWSKA School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures University of Edinburgh

Film Studies D. OSTROWSKA School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures University of Edinburgh

Grossman, Joan Delaney and Rishchin, Ruth (eds). William James in Russian Culture. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford, 2003. xi + 259 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Price unknown.

THIS focused, well-organized collection of studies by English- and Russian- speaking scholars fills a gap and lays a foundation. It is some time since Alexander Etkind's controversial books alerted students of modernism to the strong two-way flow of ideas and images between psychology and the arts. His 'James and Konovalov: The Varieties of Religious Experience and Russian Theology between Revolutions', together with A Poole's 'William James in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism, Pluralism, Personalism' are, as it were, the core of the book, detailing reception, impact, influence, controversy and the chronology of Russian translations ofJames's works.

The excellence of the volume as a whole, however, is in the contextualizing ofJames's links with Russian culture: from the percipient editors' introduction through considerations of 'The European Connection' (Linda Simon); of James as a reader of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi (Robin Feuer Miller, Donna Tussing Orwin and Andrew Wachtel); of early interest aroused by James's ideas amongst multi-lingual poets and thinkers such as Ivan Konevskoi and Viacheslav Ivanov, who did not have to wait for translations (Joan Delaney Grossman and Gennady Obatnin); of the predictably negative reaction of Lev

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REVIEWS I45

Shestov to the optimistic pragmatism of James's 'Will to believe' (Brian Horrowitz); of the exploitation of Jamesian ideas by Gor'kii and, more particularly, by Bogdanov in the exercise of 'god-building' (Barry P. Scherr); and of the revival of interest in post-Soviet Russia (Edith W. Clowes), on to David Joravsky's judicious afterword. Joravsky highlights two significant dismissals of James, by Lenin in I908 and by Zenkovskii in I948, the first of which sets the pattern for Soviet rejection of 'capitalist pragmatism' while the second warned against interpreting the Orthodox Christian teaching of 'activity in the world' 'in the spirit of that primitive pragmatism which has been expressed with such seductive naivete by William James' (p. 233). James's combination 'of psychological science and philosophical inquiry within the imagination of a romantic writer, each element of the complex union constantly challenging and provoking the other' (p. 226) was, neverthe- less, tremendously appealing to thinking Russians of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Joravsky's afterword firmly re-establishes the connection with imaginative literature at a time when the link between such literature and psychological science was at its closest and the one learned from the other: as, for example, James learned from Tolstoi and Dostoevski and Konevskoi and Viacheslav Ivanov learned from James. James's interest in psychic research and spiritism provides a timely reminder of how 'normal', even 'advanced' the practice of seance and table-turning must have seemed to the likes of Valerli Briusov. Florenskii, familiar with F. W. H. Myers rather than James from Lopatin's lectures at Moscow University, even feared back in 1904 that the State might 'impose' spiritism as a positivist surrogate for religion, a new way of controlling men's minds.

Like all good books, this one leaves the reader hungry for more. There is no mention, for instance, of William James's brother, Henry. Was he, perhaps, little read in Russia -or is it that he might have merited a companion volume?

Department of Russian Studies AVRIL PYMAN University of Durham

Masalskis, Hans. Das Sprachgenie Georg Saunenein -Eine Biographie. Literatur- und Medienwissenschaft, 88. Igel Verlag, Oldenburg, 2003. 448pp. Illustrations. Notes. ?24.00.

IT is the phenomenal linguistic ability of Georg Sauerwein (I83 1-I904) that best establishes his claim to fame, and it is not surprising that the author of this new biography has chosen to single it out in the title. He was sometimes described as a Mezzofanti, but his polyglot powers almost certainly exceeded those of the eponymous cardinal. Nevertheless, he is not as well known as Mezzofanti and might be even less well known, were it not for his work among the Prussian Lithuanians and his support for them in their resistance to Germanization. It was originally from this angle that Masalskis approached his subject. In the parts of Lithuania Minor that in I923 were joined to the young Lithuanian state Sauerwein's name was revered. Masalskis, who was born in this area in I924, recalls that in 1931, to mark the centenary of

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