American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists, Sofia, September1988: Literature by Jane Gary HarrisReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 736-737Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210455 .

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736 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

The final section, 'History and Philosophy' (pp. I70-205), includes a stimulating account by M. Raeff of the transformation of the Muscovite state into a Western European-style empire. G. Brogi-Bercoff describes an early nineteenth-century French manuscript in the Vatican which deals with Karamzin's history of the Russian state. The interesting and little-researched topic of P. Miliukov on the role of freemasonry in the spiritual and political life of Russia is investigated by I. Martynov, and N. Prat writes on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century in relation to N. Berdiaev's article 'On the new Russian idealism'. Finally, Y. Cohen traces the continuation of the humanist and the grotesque traditions in recent samizdat poetry and prose.

A book of this type would perhaps be more satisfactory if its contents were organized around a central theme; the contributions which make up this volume vary in quality and are unevenly edited. However, the variety is in itself a form of tribute to the wide-ranging talents of the literary scholar to whom it is dedicated, and specialists in many different fields should find much which is stimulating and provocative as well as scholarly. Department of Linguistic and International Studies PAMELA DAVIDSON University ofSurrey

American Contributions to the Tenth International Congress of Slavists, Sofia, September I988: Literature. Edited by Jane Gary Harris. Slavica, Columbus, Ohio, I989. 433 pp. Tables. Charts. Notes. $27.95.

IN the recent film The Decline of the American Empire it was claimed that I 7,000 academic articles are published every day. Twenty-nine pieces of flotsam from that vast tide are here assembled into a dispiriting volume. Not that it is entirely without merit: there are two solid and well-annotated quantitative metric studies (of Slavic epic and Fet) by James Bailey and Emily Klenin; a helpful, if rather pedestrian, study of the narods role in Boris Godunov by Gerald E. Mikkelson; and interesting articles by Julia Alissandratos (on Leskov, Flaubert and hagiography), Edith Clowes (on Sologub and deca- dence), Johanna Nichols (on parallels in Slavic and Caucasian folklore) and William E. Harkins (on folklore libretti by Stravinsky and Janacek), all of which, however, would have benefited from broader and fuller treatment than that allowed here. But in the case of many other contributions, essays with promisingly wide-ranging titles prove disappointingly narrow, as with the contributions by Savelii Senderevich, Greta N. Slobin and Evelyn Bristol, where discussions of the theory of hagiography, Polish and Russian deca- dence, and the Acmeists' relations with the Parnassians in fact turn out to be comparative studies of two or three well-known figures. Often, too, the sounds of barrel-scraping can be distinctly heard in the background, as with C. Nichols Lee's piece on War and Peace and The Thibaults or a trite seven-page article on plot types by Robert Belknap.

Even in the better contributions one misses a sense of how one minute area of study might fit into larger patterns, which seems odd in work done for an international conference. It was surely the editor's job to do something about this, but perhaps that is too much to expect in a book where editing even in a

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REVIEWS 737

technical sense has been minimal. Literals abound, several sets of conventions and transliteration schemes are used, contributions in languages other than English have been left untranslated, and the style of some contributions ranges from the inelegant to the incomprehensible. Slavica's standards of book production accord with the general impression of mediocrity. Christ Church CATRIONA KELLY Oxford

Sandler, Stephanie. Distant Pleasures. Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, I989. iX + 263 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $32.50.

SANDLER'S book examines Pushkin's lyrics 'The Village', 'To Ovid', and 'To the Sea', his long poems 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus', 'The Fountain of Bakhchisarai', and 'The Gypsies', his play Boris Godunov, and his verse novel Evgenii Onegin. The author offers a new reading, using Bakhtinian discourse analysis combined with deconstruction and feminist analysis. In her approach to Pushkin's lyrics she focuses on the trope of apostrophe, and her analyses of rhetorical aspects in general are rewarding (particularly, 'To Ovid').

Talking about Pushkin's 'The Village' (Sandler pointedly translates 'Derevnia' as 'The Countryside', initially arguing that there is no village, but later she accepts that the poem describes Pushkin's family estate) she omits its link with the Russian oratorical prose of I8I2, seemingly unfamiliar with Pushkin's great interest in the rhetorical tradition of his time (see N. I. Mikhailova's article in Pushkin: issledovaniia i materialy, vol. xii, Leningrad, I 986).

Sandler makes some good observations in the chapter devoted to 'To the Sea' (pp. 5 7-76), although some of her views are taken from Tsvetaeva's 'Moi Pushkin'. Being apparently fascinated by Tsvetaeva's interpretation, Sandler would have benefited from looking at Tsvetaeva's translations into French of 'To the Sea' (available in M. Tsvetaieva, Tentative dejalousie, ed. Eve Malleret, Paris, I986, pp. i89-9i). In fact Sandler provides her own 'literal' trans- lations, 'in order to facilitate the close reading that follows' (p. 226), but they are so bleak as to be almost counter-productive in their elimination of the style she is attempting to analyse. For the start of'To the Sea', for example, Sandler offers 'Farewell, free element!', but compare this with Tsvetaeva's 'Adieu, Espaces des Espaces' as a translation of 'Proshchai, svobodnaia stikhiia'. When she goes beyond literalness Sandler lacks accuracy, for example in the same poem, when she gives 'In vain my soul tore at its fetters' for 'Votshche rvalas' dusha moia'- the verb is associated by Pushkin with the noun 'rvenie' (zeal, eagerness), but Sandler uses its alternative meaning, 'to tear'. For Pushkin models this poem upon, and alludes to, Byron's Childe Harold (especially in Canto the First) because it was composed upon the death of Byron. Sadler's primary reference to Lamartine's 'Adieux a la mer' is misplaced.

Sandler's knowledge of the significance of Byron for Pushkin is incomplete. She draws the wrong conclusions about Pushkin's dedication of the Byronic poem 'The Prisoner of the Caucasus' to Nikolai Raevskii, believing that

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