Text and Context. Essays to Honor Nils Åke Nilsson by Nils Åke Nilsson; Peter A. Jensen;Barbara Lönnqvist; Fiona Björling; Lars Kleberg; Anders SjöbergReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 641-642Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4209855 .

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REVIEWS 64 I

Also included are four papers outside the main themes. These deal with such diverse subjects as the neo-classical concept of beauty in poetry, literacy among peasants in South-West Hungary, the French correspondence between the Hungarian historians Cornides and Felmer, and Antal Ruprecht, professor of metallurgy and chemistry at Schemnitz at a time when British scholars like Townson and Clarke visited the academy there.

Previous volumes in this series have shown that much still remains to be discovered about the enlightenment and that long-accepted views need constantly to be challenged. The thirty-five contributions to this latest book continue that tradition and can be studied with profit and enjoyment. London G. F. CUSHING

Jensen, Peter A., Lonnqvist, Barbara, Bj6rling, Fiona, Kleberg, Lars, and Sjoberg, Anders (eds). Text and Context. Essays to Honor Nils Ake Nilsson. Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature, 23. Almqvist and Wiksell International, Stockholm, I987. 203 PP. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Skr. I52.00.

THIS Festschrift to celebrate Professor Nilsson's seventieth birthday contains twenty-one essays, most by Scandinavian Slavists, though some distinguished outsiders have also contributed. All but three of them are devoted to modern Russian literature, but otherwise there is little consensus on topic; the volume is cemented by its exclusions rather than its inclusions. All the essays are on high literature; moreover, on writers belonging to the enshrined literary canon, from Griboyedov to Trifonov. Popular culture, one of Nilsson's own interests, is excluded entirely. The only woman writer included is Akhmatova. Any similarity of methodology is fortuitous: the title of the volume, contrary to appearances, does not indicate that all contributors are practitioners of literary theory. Most essays are conventional close analyses or literary historical readings.

Qualitatively this collection is uneven. Six of the essays, though brief and marginal, are worthy of note. Boris Gasparov convincingly argues for a political subtext in Pushkin's Graf Nulin; Geir Kjetsaa casts new light on a central passage of the Devils; PeterJensen given an illuminating close reading of Pasternak's 'Opredelenie poezii'; Anna Ljunggren's views on the style of Annensky's lyric poems are not novel, but they are supported by material from unpublished variants; Vladimir Markov catalogues the influence of Karamzin on Bal'mont. Finally, though the subject of Lars Kleberg's essay is obscure- the Polish travelogues of the Swedish litterateur Fredrik Book - this contribution is particularly well written and interesting.

Unfortunately, many of the other contributions are either ephemeral or inchoate or both. Thomas Eekman's study of Turgenev's short prose depends on the glib assertion that 'telling a story in the "I" form has the advantage of diminishing the distance between the author and the reader' (p. 42) - hardly so in marked forms such as skaz. A central point made by Kiril Taranovsky in his 'Two Notes on Mandel'stam's "Hayloft" Poems'- that the Russian word tmin is an odd translation for the French thym (p. I 25) - is rendered redundant

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642 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

by his failure to use botanical names, and to indicate that this word is not only the Russian common name for several plants of the Umbelliferae family (carum carvi, cuminum cyminum and coriandrum sativum) but for an unrelated labiatae member, thymus serpyllum. On the other hand, the dangers of over-ambition in this format are illustrated by another contribution concerned with cookery, Aleksandr Flaker on Krleza's 'Culinary Flemishness', which is so dense and over-detailed that it made this reader feel like well-pounded splets.

As far as technical detail goes, the editing has been conscientious, save for a few inconsistencies of transliteration and punctuation. A useful bibliography of Nilsson's own works is provided. But one could wish that the editors had been more rigorous in organizing the volume. An introduction is wanting; the arrangement of the essays, chronologically by date of primary text, has little to recommend it; and above all, it is a pity that more energetic pruning was not done. What could have been an impressive selection of, say, ten essays has emerged as a ragged miscellany. Christ Church CATRIONA KELLY Oxford

Crone, Anna Lisa and Chvany, Catherine V. (eds). New Studies in Russian Language and Literature. Slavica Publishers, Columbus, Ohio, 1987. 302 pp. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies.

THIS volume is a collection of twenty-four essays dedicated, on the occasion of her retirement, to Dr Bayara Aroutunova of Harvard University. Blandly entitled, it is also unfortunately ill-coordinated and diffuse.

Dr Aroutunova has published on such topics as Pasternak, Mayakovsky, and the 'semiotics of gesture' in Russian proverbs, but she is described in the editors' introduction as, primarily, 'a talented and dedicated teacher' of Russian language. Inevitably, therefore, the contributions from former students range widely, encompassing language and linguistics, translation, folklore, seventeenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century literature. The real drawback of the collection, however, is that these varied contributions (which might better have been grouped by subject, rather than alphabetically by author) fluctuate in quality as well as content, and differ markedly in length and intention. Some aim at a narrow, specialist audience, others have overtly 'popular' appeal: there is even room for a 'verse burlesque' with footnotes on Jung and Tolstoy. Significantly, the contributors have not been required to adopt uniform stylistic conventions.

Naturally there are individual articles of real merit. J. Connolly provides a lucid and elegant analysis of the language, structure and imagery of Pushkin's 'Imitations of the Koran'. C. Isenberg breaks new ground with an appraisal of the subjective view-point and rhetorical strategies of Nadezhda Mandel'- shtam's memoirs; and N. Moyle's study of 'Mermaids and Russian Beliefs about Women' admirably combines a wealth of fascinating information with original scholarly argument. Several shorter pieces, less than ten pages each, also work well enough in context: on, for example, the paradoxes of Zoshchenko's 'Lenin tales', or diminutives in the folk lament; the boundary

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