Dialogues/ Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (Ex) Soviet and American Womenby Susan Hardy Aiken; Adele Marie Barker; Maya Korenova; Ekaterina StetsenkoReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 315-317Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211800 .

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REVIEWS 3 I 5

Slavonic material, Yiddish (in a study of Israel Singer's Sender Prager) . Each of the first two volumes of this yearbook contains worthwhile material and the I 994 issue will be awaited with interest.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University ofLondon

Aiken, Susan Hardy; Barker, Adele Marie; Korenova, Maya and Stetsenko, Ekaterina. Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (Ex)Soviet and American Women. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, and London, I994. xviii + 4I 5 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?62.00; ?I7.95.

THE compilers of this new source book are to be congratulated on a most original and worthwhile idea. They have brought together eight stories by Russian and American women writers, which are arranged as four pairs (Irina Grekova and Tillie Olsen; Toni Cade Bambara and Liudmila Petrushevskaia; Elena Makarova andJayne Anne Phillips; Anna Nerkagi and Leslie Marmon Silko). Each pair of texts is furnished with two critical articles, one by a post-Soviet Americanist, and one by a Westerner (Adele Barker is a Slavist, her colleague Susan Aiken a specialist in feminist theory and Anglophone women's writing). The stories and essays - the core of the book -are framed by an introduction describing the gestation of the project, and by a long afterword giving the background history of women's writing in Russia; this is accompanied by a substantial and helpful bibliography. The result is a book rich in comparative possibilities and interpretative insights, which gives a clear idea of the convergences, as well as divergencies, between writing by women in Russia and in America over the last thirty years. The oppressions of domestic labour, the difficulties of self-expression whether sexual or intellec- tual, the pleasures and constraints of relations with mothers and sisters as well as fathers and brothers, the intersections and conflicts between women's shared gender interests and divided concerns as members of different genera- tions and ethnic groups: these are the themes of both the American and Russian fiction that is included.

As this summary shows, all the stories included are realist in approach, but the writers all speak with individual voices. I was especially impressed by Toni Cade Bambara's wonderful account of a blues singer, 'Witchbird', a superbly energetic and appropriately rhythmic piece of work, but most of the other stories are excellent too. The only piece that altogether fails to inspire is 'Aniko of the Nogo Tribe', Anna Nerkagi's tale of a Nenets village in Siberia. As the title betrays, this is a dull piece of lightly fictionalized ethnography, whose only attempt to convey atmosphere is the loading of otherwise banal sentences with a spurious freight of Nenets words ('the people were cleaning their chooms', 'she gazed at her father's black malitsa' and so forth). Though Nerkagi herself is a Nenka, her writing brought back irresistible memories of the patronizing colonial children's fiction that was still required reading at my very old- fashioned convent school in the mid-i96os. However, inadequate though this story is in absolute terms, it does have some interest as a rare attempt on the

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3I6 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

part of an insider to write the lives of non-Russian women into Russian literary tradition, as Stetsenko and Barker argue in their sympathetic but clear-sighted afterwords.

Yet if Nerkagi's story is a case where extensive contextualization was requisite, the volume as a whole tends, perhaps, to too great an emphasis on explication of the cultural background of the Russian texts, as opposed to the American ones. This gives a slightly repetitious feel to the critical commen- taries, both in themselves and in terms of the state of the field (there now being quite a number of 'women in context'-style studies in recent Russian women's writing). What is more, at least some of the generalizations about Russian history seem to rest on a shaky factual basis, which is understandable given that three of Dialogues/Dialogi's editors are not specialists in this area. It is, for example, misleading to suggest that in Russia, 'as in England, privileged or aristocratic women began producing literary works at least as early as the thirteenth century' (p. 376). Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, Aphra Behn, or even Julian of Norwich have no Russian equivalents, and the earliest Russian woman to produce 'literature', in the strict sense, began publishing only in the 1750s. Even comments on more recent history occasionally sound garbled: the suggestion that 'official party images of women' were of 'energetic, virtually asexual workers' (p. I25) ignores the important changes in Soviet ideology after the mid- I 930s, and the assertion that the Brezhnev years represented 'a creative ferment in the arts' (p. I23) is a distinctly optimistic view of the state of affairs, in official culture at any rate.

It would have been preferable, I feel, had the energies of the three Americanists been directed more often towards the cultural pressures operat- ing in American literature, which are hardly less important than those operating in post-Soviet literature. Even the authorial photographs repro- duced give clear evidence of culturally determined differences. The American authors, posed and unsmiling, eyeball the viewer directly from glossy, copy- righted studio photographs whose impersonality is matched by that of the authorial biographies, tallies of literary prizes and writing fellowships. The Russian writers stand or sit, unposed and awkward, in fuzzy uncredited snapshots, gazing at somewhere indefinablejust off-camera, and their biogra- phies give at least as much attention to private, family matters as to pro- fessional accolades. The distinctions in status and self-fashioning that are suggested here cry out for an analysis they never receive. Similarly, the distinctions, in the compilers' opening chronicle, between the mesquite trees, acacia groves, starched napery and restaurant menus of Arizona and the food queues, filthy streets and social upheavals of Moscow are recorded, but not commented upon, and so emerge with a degree of unconscious irony. Only in Adele Barker's introduction to Jayne Anne Phillips' story, which evokes the dusty yards, polyester-covered sofas and incessant television-watching of West Virginia, does the reader gain any sense that there might be places in America where not everyone eats off white linen; where, in fact, some of the social problems of Moscow might seem surprisingly close.

This is a pioneering book, though, and one, what is more, explicitly aimed at an American audience, which will supply its own cultural context. To demand an exhaustive analysis of both cultures would be unfair; in any case, one can

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REVIEWS 31 7

understand that the two Russians involved would feel chary about comment- ing on American culture when their opportunities for observing it at first hand had hitherto been so restricted. In any case, irrespective of its asymmetry of emphasis, this is a stimulating, representative and (minor editorial blemishes aside) well-produced illustration and account of a subject that is bound to be of great interest to Slavists and specialists in women's studies alike. School of Slavonic and East European Studies CATRIONA KELLY

University ofLondon

Kunert, Ilse (ed.). Studien zur polnischen Literatur-, Sprach- und Kulturgeschichte im i8. Jahrhundert: Vortrage der3. deutsch-polnischen Polonistenkonferenz, Thbingen, April i99i. Schriften des Komitees der Bundesrepublik Deutschland zur F6rderung der Slawischen Studien. Vol. I5. B6hlau, Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, I993. 305 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. DM 98.oo.

THIS substantial volume includes nineteen papers presented at the Third Polish-German Conference devoted to the evolution of Polish language, literature and culture. The Conference was held in Tiubingen in April i99i and concentrated on the developments taking place in the eighteenth century. Two earlier Conferences in Bonn and Cracow covered, broadly speaking, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively. Taking part in the Tilbingen Conference were Polish and German philologists, historians and experts on literature; one contribution came from a Dutch scholar.

The volume is a bilingual publication: nine papers are in Polish, ten in German. The editor has done a very good job in ensuring that the text is devoid of spelling and printer's errors - quite an achievement for a collection of papers presented in two very different languages.

Part One deals with language development and contains two papers by German and four by Polish contributors. Ilse Kunert scrutinizes the evolution of the Polish language at the time of the Enlightenment from a comparative perspective and Jochen Raecke analyses the impact of the Enlightenment upon sentence formation in a way which will delight the experts. Of the four papers in Polish the first one, by Stanislawv Urbaniczyk, convincingly docu- ments great concern for the Polish language at the time of the Enlightenment. The other three concentrate upon the language of particular texts originally published in the course of the eighteenth century. Several interesting issues receive attention, for example the relevance to language use of religious convictions and value systems as well as of political and social norms; Sarmatism; the influence of Latin and the persuasive function of the language of the eighteenth-century press.

In the first section of Part Two, which focuses on literature, Julian Mas- lanka examines the essential character of the historical myths propagated in the period of the baroque and the Enlightenment, while Herta Schmid from Amsterdam examines what she believes to be a close connection between the Polish literature of the eighteenth century and that of the twentieth century, by referring to Slawomir Mrozek's theatre of the absurd and, marginally, also to Vaclav Havel. In the second section of Part Two five contributors - of whom four are from Poland - look at broader issues characterizing Polish literature

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