Serapion Sister: The Poetry of Elizaveta Polonskaja by Leslie Dorfman Davis; ElizavetaPolonskajaReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 517-519Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4213513 .

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REVIEWS 5 I 7

constitutes a commendably serious attempt to understand the religious dimension of Dostoevsky's novel, and to do so without reducing it either to the Orthodox tradition, or to psychology, or some other system of thought with which Dostoevsky (and Myshkin) would be fundamentally out of sympathy.

French's book is not only a close reading with a powerful theoretical drive, it is also a polemic with a number of strong, mostly American, precursors. Chief among these is Robin Feuer Miller whose highly regarded Dostoevsky and 'The Idiot'. Author, Narrator and Reader (Cambridge, MA, 198I) is constantly referred to in the early chapters, almost always for the purpose of expressing disagreement. Michael Holquist, who is more sympathetically treated, is subjected to a special critique in several sections of the last chapter. Others are mentioned less frequently in passing. Elizabeth Dalton is included in the bibliography but not mentioned in the text. While the polemic is an inessential part of the study, it nevertheless has the merit of situating French's work in relation to that of leading English-speaking contemporaries. 'Contemporary', however, has to be taken in a special sense for which the book gives no explanation, for it is curious that an academic work which takes its precursors so seriously should make no discernible reference, either in the text or in the otherwise conscientious bibliography, to anything published since I 983. Much of relevance to both Dostoevsky and to Bakhtin's religious thought has been published since then, including important work by the founder of the series in which the volume appears, Gary Saul Morson, and, of course, the extensive writings of post-Soviet Russian critics. While French's book loses none of its force as a consequence, his preference for highlighting his disagreements with other critics throws this lacuna into relief. Perhaps the typescript has been languishing unpublished for nearly twenty years and the author had no opportunity to update it. The former would be a matter of greater regret than the latter for, as the author would no doubt wish to remind us, it is now happily in the public sphere where it can enter into dialogue with other works, some of which will reinforce its position and other subject it in its turn to radical challenge.

Nottingham MALCOLM V. JONES

Davis, Leslie Dorfman. Serapion Sister. The Poetry of Elizaveta Polonskaja. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 200I. 268 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $85.00.

THOUGH she was unusual in belonging, albeit briefly, to a literary grouping (the Serapion Brothers highlighted by the title of this new study), Elizaveta Polonskaia (i 890- I 969) was in many other ways relatively typical of Russian women writers who came to maturity in the first generation of Soviet power. The rapid dissipation after her death of the high reputation that she attained in her lifetime is also characteristic of Russian women poets more broadly, from Elisaveta Kul'man in the early nineteenth century, to Mirra Lokhvitskaia in the early twentieth century, and Vera Inber or Marnia Petrovykh in the late twentieth century. Commended in the I920S by critics such as D. S. Mirskii, Polonskaia published as many as nine collections of verse over the course of

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5I8 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002

her career, and contributed also to the familiar alternative genres, for Soviet women writers, of children's literature, memoirs, and translation. But she has been almost completely neglected since her death, with even her centenary going more or less unmarked, both in Russia and elsewhere. Leslie Dorfman Davis's book is the first substantial study of Polonskaia to appear in any language, and is in this sense truly pioneering. It is based on assiduous if not quite exhaustive research (manuscript materials are drawn from three sources alone, the private archive of the Polonskii family, and the holdings in lichnye

fondy, such as those of Mariia Shkapskaia and Il'ia Erenburg, held in RGALI and in RNB, though Davis has used what she has seen, especially the private archive, to good effect; published materials consulted omit, for instance, G. S. Smith's publication of two letters from D. S. Mirskii in SEER, 73, I995, 3, pp. 490-98, but cast the net quite widely otherwise). And the detailed treatment of Polonskaia's life and works given here will undoubtedly make sure that the poet gets considerably more notice from critics interested in Russian women's writing, and save future authors of generalizing studies from relying on Polonskaia's own self-censoring and life-revising autobiographical sketch of I966, a practice for which Davis understandably rebukes, among others, Marina Ledkovsky, Charlotte Rosenthal, as well as Mary Zirin's Dictionay of Russian Women Writers (Westport, CT, 1994), and my own History of Russian Women's Writing I820-I992 (Oxford, I994).

To what extent the study will get Polonskaia noticed beyond the somewhat specialized readership of scholars already working on Russian women's poetry is, however, debatable. Some passing observations on Jewish literature of the I920S aside (pp. 66-70), or on Kollontai's writings as parallel to Polonskaia's poems of assertive eroticism in 1923-24 (pp. 79, I09-I0), this is an almost context-free discussion of the poet's work. Davis provides some quite interesting observations on Polonskaia's treatment of Jewish themes (pp. 6I-70). She investigates the scandal provoked by her poem 'I Cannot Abide the Infant Jesus', which was outrageous to secularized Jews, such as Erenburg (perhaps because of its determination to engage with Christian culture, rather than to ignore this) as well as to believing Christians. But the uninformed reader would never gather that Polonskaia was one of several talented poets of Jewish origin born around the turn of the twentieth century who came to artistic maturity during the I920S and '30s -others included Sofiia Pregel', Raisa Blokh, and Anna Prismanova outside Russia, and Sofiia Parnok, Vera Inber and Margarita Aliger inside it. Without some considera- tion of the 'creative paths' of these women, several of whom (like many of their male coevals) chose one form or another of assimilation (commitment to Soviet culture, in the case of Inber and Aliger, and conversion to Christianity in the case of Parnok and Prismanova), the idiosyncratic artistic decisions made by Polonskaia lose some of their force. The many other places where expansion would have been welcome include Polonskaia's friendship with another unusual Soviet poet, Marnia Shkapskaia. Although she cites unpub- lished letters from Polonskaia held in RGALI, and lists Shkapskaia among the figures Polonskaia herself recalls associating with in her memoir of the Russian Academy, Davis never investigates this relationship in any detail, and indeed, the writer's intellectual and emotional universe generally emerges haphazardly

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REVIEWS 5I9

and superficially, according to a kind of biography by scatter-gun effect (though there is a helpful summary of the external facts of Polonskaia's life at the beginning).

In a similar way, analysis of the poetry is preoccupied for the most part with surface and content, and comments are presented in the form of a catalogue, rather than a synthesis. For instance, we hear that 'the strikingly frank expression of female sensuality, the wilfulness of the persona, her resignation to the inevitable loss of love, and the idea of poetry as solace and reward for one's loss' are constants in Polonskaia's love poems (p. 72), but not what the effects of this are, or why Polonskaia chose to write in this way. Recurrent metaphors, preferred metres, compositional methods (stanzaic structure, for instance), and lexis almost uniformly escape beyond the borders of analysis (the comments on 'Ballad of a Fugitive' and 'In the Noose' are exceptional in including some consideration of the fabric of Polonskaia's verse). No explicit consideration is given to developments in her writing either. Yet, from the early I930s, Polonskaia's poetry became a compendium of the canonical topics of the day -Pushkin jubilees, joyous childhood, Soviet patriotism, the benevolence of the wise leader while, conversely, it went through an extraordinary shift in the reverse direction during the I96os, when she produced some deeply felt and individually expressed poems about less comfortable themes, such as old age, or Soviet history.

A certain lack of contextualization is apparent also in the consideration of the reception of Polonskaia. Certainly, critical opinion is conscientiously recorded, but the implications of it for Polonskaia's status are not considered, nor is her ambiguous relationship with the canons of official literature considered in detail. This aspect of the study would have been much strengthened by consideration of the growing 'revisionist' literature on official Soviet writers, such as Thomas Lahusen's How Life Writes the Book (Ithaca, NY, 1997), Richard Borden's work on Kataev, and most particularly Katharine Hodgson's articles about Ol'ga Berggol'ts. Without a doubt, this book will be an invaluable aid to further study of Polonskaia for those who have already discovered her work. But it is rather doubtful whether it will do much to popularize her work in the best sense to make this familiar to readers who do not know Russian, to inspire students and general readers to learn more, and to make Polonskaia a fixture in courses dealing with twentieth-century poetry. In short, Serapion Sister is a thorough and solidly researched piece of work, but not exactly user-friendly in the reading. It somehow suits the general effect that the index should be rather short of adequate: the titles of some important works appear only in Russian (although they are cited in English in the main text), and others do not appear at all, and there is no analytical entry on Polonskaia's life, and almost no entries for subjects, so that the reader attempting to chase up passing details is reduced to limping through the entire book page by page.

New College, Oxford CATRIONA KELLY

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