Canadian Slavonic Papers

Fruits of her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture by Helena GosciloReview by: Catriona KellyCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 36, No. 1/2, Centenary ofIsaak Babel (March-June 1994), pp. 275-277Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870804 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 275

succeeded in convincing the German nobility and the clergy that church texts in Sorbian were not only a good thing, but a downright necessity in order to prevent Sorbian Protestants from reconverting to Catholicism, since the Prague diocese had been busy providing Sorbian books for the Catholic population. As a result, a commission was formed to oversee the preparation of further translations of church texts and to arrive at some orthographic norms. Schuster-Sewc calls this commission "the first Sorbian language commission" (p. 20); he also points out that Frentzel was not invited to be a member probably because his uncompromising stand had antagonized the Landstände (body of representatives in Lusatia).

The significance of the Postwitz Baptismal Font for historical Slavic linguistics and dialectology lies in the fact that 1) this text is written in an archaic dialect at the southern periphery of Upper Sorbian, a dialect that is extinct today due to the Germanization of the area; and 2) since the text is not a translation, but a sermon or set of sermons, it contains relatively little German or Czech ecclesiastic loan vocabulary and may represent a fairly close approximation of late 17th century colloquial Upper Sorbian. As Schuster-Sewc points out (p. 49), there are a number of features linking Frentzel' s dialect with Lower Sorbian, an indication that the two languages may have been closer at one time than the present-day differences between Upper and Lower Sorbian would seem to indicate.

As one has come to expect from Böhlau Verlag' s Mitteldeutsche Forschungen, the typographical layout of the present volume is very attractive. The price of the volume is somewhat prohibitive, making it difficult, in all likelihood, even for some libraries to acquire this work. There are few misprints if one ignores the consistently misspelled Supperlativ instead of Superlativ ("superlative"). It is interesting that Schuster-Sewc (or Böhlau?) has opted for the West German v in slavisch as opposed to the vv still prevalent in the states of the former GDR {Lëtopis, the Journal for Sorbian Studies, still uses slawisch) and, for that matter, used by Böhlau in previous reprints (e.g., in Ernst Eichler's postscript to Gustav Hey 's Die slavischen Siedlungen im Königreich Sachsen, 1893 [1981]). The spelling with w seems to the present reviewer to constitute part of the cultural substance of the former GDR, substance that, according to the Unity Treaty, is supposed not to have suffered any damage (Article 35.2).

Gunter Schaarschmidt, University of Victoria

Helena Goscilo, ed. Fruits of her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. xxiii, 278 pp. Notes. Index. $49.95, cloth. $18.95, paper.

Helena Goscilo, of the University of Pittsburgh, is becoming almost as well-known for her expertise in punning as she is for her acumen as a critic; no doubt we can soon expect a sequel to this new collection under the title Les Plumes de Leur Tantes. That said, there is nothing facetious in the thirteen essays that are collected here, many of which are thoughtful, and thought-provoking, meditations on aspects of contemporary women's writing in Russia, and also (though to a lesser extent) upon the context in which literature produced by women is generated.

As Goscilo points out in her brisk introduction, the approaches adopted by the contributors vary quite widely. Some essays more or less confine themselves to unadorned factual reportage of recent developments on the literary scene. Nicholas Zekulin's "Soviet Russian Women's Literature in the Early 1980s," is a useful addition to the burgeoning numbers of surveys on this theme; it takes in the lesser-known Bashkirova and Iunina as well as Tolstaia, Grekova and Katerli. Similar in their introductory aims and straightforward style are Jerzy Kolodziej's "Iulia Voznesenskaia's Women: with

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276 BOOK REVIEWS

Love and Squalor" and Richard Chappie's "Happy Never After: the Work of Viktoriia Tokareva and Glasnost1." Briefer and, as its title suggests, rather more soft-centred, is Darra Goldstein's 'The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts," which will, however, no doubt attract attention to the study of this talented but still understudied poet (even if Shvarts is not quite such unexplored territory as is suggested by the notes to this article, which recognise the existence of no secondary literature whatever.)

The other essays have move obvious theoretical or literary ambitions. Beth Holmgren's "The Creation of Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel'shtam" has now appeared in expanded form as a chapter of Holmgren's monograph Women's Work in Stalin's Time (Indiana University Press, 1993) [reviewed in CSP 35.3-4-Ed.], but the sketch of Mandel'shtam's self- fashioning here will whet the appetite of readers who have not yet encountered the monograph. Thomas Lahusen's "'Leaving Paradise' and Perestroika" is a judicious summary of the limitations and strengths of Natal'ia Baranskaia's fiction; Lahusen decides, in the final analysis, to emphasise the latter. Nadya L. Peterson's "Games Women Play: The 'Erotic' Prose of Valeriia Narbikova" is a sympathetic but astute articulation of the ambivalence felt by many readers of Narbikova' s sensationalist prose. John Givens' "Reflections, Crooked Mirrors, Magic Theatres" is a lively interpretation of "Peters," one of Tolstaia's best stories. Of the surveys, Stephanie Sandier' s article on four twentieth-century women poets - Akhmatova, Lisnianskaia, Petrovykh and Nikolaeva - would have benefited by being allowed more generous space by the editor, but for all that manages to combine cogent analyses of its subjects with stimulating reflection on the status of women's poetry in Russia and on canonics in general. Helena Goscilo's "Speaking Bodies: Erotic Zones Rhetoricized" (a version of which has appeared in Stanford Slavonic Studies, 1993) analyses the writing of the female body in Petrushevskaia, Tolstaia, Narbikova and Marina Palei. Only Palei, Goscilo contends, has truly broken away from the "masculine" tradition of body as trope, but the other three writers' flexible and contrary use of rhetorical strategies means that they have made genuinely original contributions to the tradition of body as metaphor. On the way to this conclusion, some astute incidental observations emerge, but so too do a few unresolved contradictions (for example, having accepted that Petrushevskaia "makes sparing use of dysphemistic terminology" on p. 138, the reader is a little puzzled when she is hailed as "the high priestess of dysphemism" on p. 145. Or are we perhaps seeing a demonstration of how "the law of diminishing returns" works in reverse?) The last of the surveys, Svetlana Boym's interesting essay 'The Poetics of Banality: Tat'iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova" is a dissection of the anxieties generated in women artists by the subject of poshlosV or kitsch in modern (post)-Soviet culture, and especially by its associations with the domestic world and with the abject resonance of the term "femininity." As well as being an original and provocative piece of work, Boym's is the only contribution that really justifies the reference to "women's culture," as opposed to "women's writing," in the subtitle of this collection.

Given the disparity of material in the essays, it is not surprising that standards vary. Some fruits, to borrow the metaphor of the title, have been plucked from the tree in a less than perfectly ripe condition. This is particularly true of two contributions which take the theories of Bakhtin as their starting point. Caryl Emerson's "Bakhtin and Women: A Nontopic with Immense Implications" restates the truism that Bakhtin had little to say about the subject of women in order to initiate an attack on several randomly chosen, but supposedly representative, feminist writers who have attempted to incorporate Bakhtinian theory into their analyses of gender issues. The drift is less that Bakhtin, as a patriarchal thinker, is unsuitable for feminist appropriation (an idea which some feminists would be likely to endorse) than that the gender-free theories of Bakhtin are a demonstration of the limitations and errors inherent to all feminism (an idea which many who do not consider themselves feminists are likely to find ludicrous; as a strategy, it's a bit like answering

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feminist objections to the sexism of religion by quoting in extenso from the Old Testament). The practical, as well as the logical, foundations of Emerson's argument are shaky, since she herself admits she knows little about feminist theory - which does not, however, stop her from communicating, like a mirror-image of the anecdotal art-gallery philistine, exactly what it is that she doesn't like about it. Whilst argument about Bakhtin and feminism is certain to continue for the foreseeable future (as has happened in the analogous case of Freud), one can only hope that debate will be more productive than is anticipated by this statement of dogma ex cathedra. That said, though, it is unfortunate that the other "Bakhtinian" contribution, Natal'ia L'vova's essay on "Bakhtin's Concept of the Grotesque and the Art of Petrushevskaia and Tolstaia," should go close to playing into Emerson's hands, attaching as it does a vulgarisation of Bakhtin' s theories of carnival to a superficial analysis of two key women writers of the glasnost period.

The theoretical contributions aside, however, very few of the essays in this book could be described as perfunctory or unhelpful. Taken all in all, Fruits of Her Plume is a useful contribution to the study of Russian women's writing. It is particularly welcome for its consideration of offbeat themes and lesser-known writers in a manner accessible to student readers; accordingly, it is likely to provide much-needed backup material for courses on women's writing, my own included.

Catriona Kelly, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London

Robert D. Kaplan. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. First Edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 308 pp. Map. Photographs. Bibliography. $12.00, paper.

When a work praised by the New York Times as "one of the best books of 1993" is in its seventh edition, then it certainly deserves attention. This is even more true if the book deals with the history of the troubled Balkans, as does Balkan Ghosts by American journalist Robert D. Kaplan. Unfortunately, a more detailed examination of Kaplan's Journey Through History reveals that his text is not based on reliable historical sources. Kaplan offers new prejudices about the Balkan nations combined with old clichés created by other Western travellers. Briefly, instead of trying to explain the roots of the current conflicts in the region, Kaplan describes what he wants to see, and that is hatred. In the Romanian city of Timisoara, writes Kaplan, "nobody I interviewed got angry, or said anything really outrageous. I got bored quickly in Timisoara... In Timisoara, Romania was less a reality than a powerful memory" (p. 183): evidently, for Kaplan, reality without hatred is less than real. Kaplan is so obsessed with hatred that he arrives at the "original" conclusion that "Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins," for "[a]mong the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously" (p. xxiii)!

Kaplan states that some of his colleagues "fact-checked parts of the manuscript" (p. xii), but there are serious errors in all parts of his book. On page xiii, Kaplan gives a 1993 "Map of the Balkans" that includes Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia (which consists of Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina - although the latter was recognized as an independent state in 1992), Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and even the eastern part of Austria. The map arbitrarily equates "Balkan" with South-Eastern Europe; in comparison, the map of the 1993 reprint of the 1914 Carnegie Endowment study about the causes of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) includes Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Albania, Serbia, and Montenegro. The territory of Bosnia (not to mention Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Austria) was not Balkan in 1914. "The Danube," writes Kaplan, "is more than twice as long as any other river in Europe, touching seven countries on its 1,776-mile journey" (p. 101). However, the longest river

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