Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in RevolutionaryRussia by Michael S. GorhamReview by: Catriona KellySlavic Review, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 683-684Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1520403 .

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Book Reviews 683

All this builds up to a tragic picture of a highly skilled poet who can do anything with words but make them sing and live-and who knows it. The author's own conclusions, couched in less emotive language and based on a careful totting-up of percentages, are not dissimilar. "To sum up, we can say: the poetry inspired by the time through which Briusov lived, standing as it does in the field of tension between tradition and innovation, remains predominantly traditional in the realm of imagery and symbols, providing isolated exam- ples of creative novelty but nonetheless failing to impart any decisive impulse to the di- rection of Russian literature" (317, my translation). She concludes with a touching plea to view even the political poetry of this once symbolist author "sub specie aeternitatis," which alone will permit the formation of "a differentiated and just assessment of Briusov and his position in Russian literature" (318).

She makes her case well, not only by detailed and perceptive analyses of the texts, but through extensive, though not uncritical, use of German, Polish, and Russian secondary sources. Her textology is particularly impressive, as, for instance, in the reconstruction of the 1919 poetic dialogue between Briusov and Konstantin Bal'mont. Although some English-language sources are cited in the bibliography, Ben Hellman's Poets of Hope and De- spair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (1914-1918) (1995) is not among them. This is a pity for these authors in a sense complement one another, each supplying a very different "take" on Briusov the political animal and Briusov the poet.

The full-time academic editor is, alas, a virtually extinct species. This is particularly to be regretted when a caring editorial eye would not only have minimized repetition but would certainly have eliminated the threefold misattribution of Andrei Belyi's first col- lection Zoloto v lazuri to Aleksandr Blok and then to Bal'mont. It should be stressed that Siwczyk-Lammers is a thoroughly painstaking scholar and that this particularly persistent slip is an aberration. I finished her book with the feeling that I had come closer to Briusov than ever before. I had not, for instance, been aware that he had introduced the seminal trope of Faust's conjuring of the Erdgeist for the intelligentsia's reaction to revolution as early as 1905, nor had I appreciated the extent to which it was creative impotence that led him to abjure poetry for experience as a war correspondent. The discovery of how amus- ingly-and tragically-Briusov remained true to his younger self in Dnevnik poeta is an- other gift of this careful, step-by-step study.

AVRIL PYMAN

University of Durham, United Kingdom

Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia. By Michael S. Gorham. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. xi, 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00, hard bound.

Michael S. Gorham's thought-provoking, elegantly written new book is essentially a long essay on two interlocking themes: views of language in the new political and cultural elite during the first two decades of Soviet power, and mass participation in the public use of language, particularly political language (concentrating on the worker-correspondent movement and on language in the Soviet classroom). Gorham argues for a shift from an orally dominated, mass-participatory, "revolutionary" milieu in the first years of Soviet power, when it was customary to argue that Vladimir Lenin was the great iconoclast of style, to greater linguistic conservatism and a restoration of propriety in the 1930s, as politicians and professional linguists alike began to champion linguistic puritanism as a route to hegemony. In other words, Gorham advances a more substantial and detailed version of the argument he introduced in an earlier article, "From Charisma to Cant: Models of Pub- lic Speaking in Early Soviet Russia" (Canadian Slavonic Papers 38, no. 4 [1996]: 331-56).

Gorham's book is interdisciplinary in ambition, and among its achievements is that it provides a broader cultural context for the radical stylistics of such famous writers as Andrei Platonov, Isaak Babel', and Mikhail Zoshchenko, as well as Aleksandr Fadeev and Dmitrii Furmanov; that it addresses the genre of ocherk with unusually scrupulous atten- tion; and that it makes a contribution to the emerging interest in the political rhetoric of

Book Reviews 683

All this builds up to a tragic picture of a highly skilled poet who can do anything with words but make them sing and live-and who knows it. The author's own conclusions, couched in less emotive language and based on a careful totting-up of percentages, are not dissimilar. "To sum up, we can say: the poetry inspired by the time through which Briusov lived, standing as it does in the field of tension between tradition and innovation, remains predominantly traditional in the realm of imagery and symbols, providing isolated exam- ples of creative novelty but nonetheless failing to impart any decisive impulse to the di- rection of Russian literature" (317, my translation). She concludes with a touching plea to view even the political poetry of this once symbolist author "sub specie aeternitatis," which alone will permit the formation of "a differentiated and just assessment of Briusov and his position in Russian literature" (318).

She makes her case well, not only by detailed and perceptive analyses of the texts, but through extensive, though not uncritical, use of German, Polish, and Russian secondary sources. Her textology is particularly impressive, as, for instance, in the reconstruction of the 1919 poetic dialogue between Briusov and Konstantin Bal'mont. Although some English-language sources are cited in the bibliography, Ben Hellman's Poets of Hope and De- spair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (1914-1918) (1995) is not among them. This is a pity for these authors in a sense complement one another, each supplying a very different "take" on Briusov the political animal and Briusov the poet.

The full-time academic editor is, alas, a virtually extinct species. This is particularly to be regretted when a caring editorial eye would not only have minimized repetition but would certainly have eliminated the threefold misattribution of Andrei Belyi's first col- lection Zoloto v lazuri to Aleksandr Blok and then to Bal'mont. It should be stressed that Siwczyk-Lammers is a thoroughly painstaking scholar and that this particularly persistent slip is an aberration. I finished her book with the feeling that I had come closer to Briusov than ever before. I had not, for instance, been aware that he had introduced the seminal trope of Faust's conjuring of the Erdgeist for the intelligentsia's reaction to revolution as early as 1905, nor had I appreciated the extent to which it was creative impotence that led him to abjure poetry for experience as a war correspondent. The discovery of how amus- ingly-and tragically-Briusov remained true to his younger self in Dnevnik poeta is an- other gift of this careful, step-by-step study.

AVRIL PYMAN

University of Durham, United Kingdom

Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia. By Michael S. Gorham. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003. xi, 266 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00, hard bound.

Michael S. Gorham's thought-provoking, elegantly written new book is essentially a long essay on two interlocking themes: views of language in the new political and cultural elite during the first two decades of Soviet power, and mass participation in the public use of language, particularly political language (concentrating on the worker-correspondent movement and on language in the Soviet classroom). Gorham argues for a shift from an orally dominated, mass-participatory, "revolutionary" milieu in the first years of Soviet power, when it was customary to argue that Vladimir Lenin was the great iconoclast of style, to greater linguistic conservatism and a restoration of propriety in the 1930s, as politicians and professional linguists alike began to champion linguistic puritanism as a route to hegemony. In other words, Gorham advances a more substantial and detailed version of the argument he introduced in an earlier article, "From Charisma to Cant: Models of Pub- lic Speaking in Early Soviet Russia" (Canadian Slavonic Papers 38, no. 4 [1996]: 331-56).

Gorham's book is interdisciplinary in ambition, and among its achievements is that it provides a broader cultural context for the radical stylistics of such famous writers as Andrei Platonov, Isaak Babel', and Mikhail Zoshchenko, as well as Aleksandr Fadeev and Dmitrii Furmanov; that it addresses the genre of ocherk with unusually scrupulous atten- tion; and that it makes a contribution to the emerging interest in the political rhetoric of

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.60 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 12:57:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Slavic Review Slavic Review

Bolshevism and Stalinism. Stephen Kotkin, as everyone knows, coined the phrase "speak- ing Bolshevik"; this study (concerned in the first instance with the more easily analyzable question of "writing Bolshevik") establishes more clearly what the characteristics of Bol- shevik style were, how they changed over time, and how they were negotiated by individu- als who (like peasant Orthodox believers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) sin- cerely believed in their own ideological rectitude but did not always get things right from the point of view of monitors higher up the line.

Gorham's arguments are well articulated and persuasive, his analyses of the textual material that he cites acute, and he has an eye for striking material, from offbeat sources as well as more obvious ones. Nevertheless, the study has certain limitations, evident above all in its citation of printed materials. The book essentially turns into a study of how edu- cated observers, including professional politicians, thought language should be, and about their views of linguistic performance by the masses, rather than about the nature of that linguistic performance itself. In a sense, this is understandable (there is a risk of superim- posing a would-be authoritative, but in fact anachronistic, schema when one looks directly at linguistic artifacts from another era). But discourse analysis that refrains even from an- alyzing discourse, and concentrates on discourse about discourse, is nonetheless at risk of getting trapped a bit too far down the representational hall of mirrors. The book would have been given strength and variety by recourse to the actual material produced by new users of political jargon-as gently satirized by Zoshchenko in his story "Monkey Lan- guage," for instance-before it went through the editing and filtering process imposed upon items that reached print. The archives of letters sent to, say, Krest'ianskaia gazeta or Bezbozhnik have been mined by historians searching for information about lower-class ex- perience and mentality, but the nature of self-expression to be found there has generally received at best sketchy treatment. Witnessing a sophisticated textual critic with a grasp of literary and cultural theory get to work on them would have been interesting and welcome.

Another gap in the discussion relates to the rewriting of literary texts that became a common phenomenon as the socialist realist aesthetic took hold. This affected primarily stylistics (Fedor Gladkov's Cement being a case in point), rather than ideology. Possibly Gorham thought that all of this was too well known to need a further airing, but it seems odd not to mention it even in the introduction or as an aside in one of the main chapters.

Nevertheless, this remains an instructive and, in several important respects, original study, with a good deal of value to impart about Soviet attitudes toward language and about the development of Soviet modes of public self-expression and identity more broadly.

CATRIONA KELLY New College, Oxford University

La morte del romanzo: Dall'avanguardia al realismo socialista. By Maria Zalambani. Rome: Carocci editore, 2003. 223 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 1 6.90, paper.

The title of this excellent study ("Death of the Novel" misses the connection with "ro- mance," but the Russian "Smert' romana" comes close) is fine for advertising, but it does not do justice to Maria Zalambani's scholarship. The subtitle gives only a hint of the tor- tuous road taken by Russian literature, in theory and practice, during the period covered expertly by the author. The road is the path Russian theory, aesthetics, and poetics took from the clear heights of Viktor Shklovskii and Boris Eikhenbaum down to the nebulous flatlands of Vladimir Ermilov and Emel'ian Iaroslavskii.

Zalambani begins by tracing the origins of literaturafakta to the "production novel," which, in turn, elicits nineteenth-century naturalism (Fedor Reshetnikov and Nikolai Po- mialovskii are mentioned), formalism, Marxism, and the influence of film. The link with formalism requires some explanation and Shklovskii's arguments are presented in detail. But later, in a chapter on literary constructivism, Zalambani is able to demonstrate that the basic theses of formalism resist being assimilated into literatura fakta. In a chapter devoted to Vladimir Maiakovskii, Zalambani suggests that the poet could not stay within the limits he had established in theory.

Bolshevism and Stalinism. Stephen Kotkin, as everyone knows, coined the phrase "speak- ing Bolshevik"; this study (concerned in the first instance with the more easily analyzable question of "writing Bolshevik") establishes more clearly what the characteristics of Bol- shevik style were, how they changed over time, and how they were negotiated by individu- als who (like peasant Orthodox believers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) sin- cerely believed in their own ideological rectitude but did not always get things right from the point of view of monitors higher up the line.

Gorham's arguments are well articulated and persuasive, his analyses of the textual material that he cites acute, and he has an eye for striking material, from offbeat sources as well as more obvious ones. Nevertheless, the study has certain limitations, evident above all in its citation of printed materials. The book essentially turns into a study of how edu- cated observers, including professional politicians, thought language should be, and about their views of linguistic performance by the masses, rather than about the nature of that linguistic performance itself. In a sense, this is understandable (there is a risk of superim- posing a would-be authoritative, but in fact anachronistic, schema when one looks directly at linguistic artifacts from another era). But discourse analysis that refrains even from an- alyzing discourse, and concentrates on discourse about discourse, is nonetheless at risk of getting trapped a bit too far down the representational hall of mirrors. The book would have been given strength and variety by recourse to the actual material produced by new users of political jargon-as gently satirized by Zoshchenko in his story "Monkey Lan- guage," for instance-before it went through the editing and filtering process imposed upon items that reached print. The archives of letters sent to, say, Krest'ianskaia gazeta or Bezbozhnik have been mined by historians searching for information about lower-class ex- perience and mentality, but the nature of self-expression to be found there has generally received at best sketchy treatment. Witnessing a sophisticated textual critic with a grasp of literary and cultural theory get to work on them would have been interesting and welcome.

Another gap in the discussion relates to the rewriting of literary texts that became a common phenomenon as the socialist realist aesthetic took hold. This affected primarily stylistics (Fedor Gladkov's Cement being a case in point), rather than ideology. Possibly Gorham thought that all of this was too well known to need a further airing, but it seems odd not to mention it even in the introduction or as an aside in one of the main chapters.

Nevertheless, this remains an instructive and, in several important respects, original study, with a good deal of value to impart about Soviet attitudes toward language and about the development of Soviet modes of public self-expression and identity more broadly.

CATRIONA KELLY New College, Oxford University

La morte del romanzo: Dall'avanguardia al realismo socialista. By Maria Zalambani. Rome: Carocci editore, 2003. 223 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 1 6.90, paper.

The title of this excellent study ("Death of the Novel" misses the connection with "ro- mance," but the Russian "Smert' romana" comes close) is fine for advertising, but it does not do justice to Maria Zalambani's scholarship. The subtitle gives only a hint of the tor- tuous road taken by Russian literature, in theory and practice, during the period covered expertly by the author. The road is the path Russian theory, aesthetics, and poetics took from the clear heights of Viktor Shklovskii and Boris Eikhenbaum down to the nebulous flatlands of Vladimir Ermilov and Emel'ian Iaroslavskii.

Zalambani begins by tracing the origins of literaturafakta to the "production novel," which, in turn, elicits nineteenth-century naturalism (Fedor Reshetnikov and Nikolai Po- mialovskii are mentioned), formalism, Marxism, and the influence of film. The link with formalism requires some explanation and Shklovskii's arguments are presented in detail. But later, in a chapter on literary constructivism, Zalambani is able to demonstrate that the basic theses of formalism resist being assimilated into literatura fakta. In a chapter devoted to Vladimir Maiakovskii, Zalambani suggests that the poet could not stay within the limits he had established in theory.

684 684

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.60 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 12:57:33 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions