The Lives of Elsa Triolet by Lachlan MacKinnonReview by: Catriona KellyThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 70, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 532-533Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4211031 .

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532 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

Erwin C. Brody packs opinions and information into some IO,OOO words of introduction, but this preamble hardly justifies the purchase (or the publi- cation) of the book, for Brody's reading of Mandel'shtam is vitiated by vapid invocations of Camus, Pirandello and Rilke and his credibility is undermined by malapropisms in German. Queen Mary and Westfield College DONALD RAYFIELD University ofLondon

Mackinnon, Lachlan. The Lives of Elsa Triolet. Chatto and Windus, London, I 992. Xiii + 2I6 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. ? I 8.oo.

THOUGH accounts of her life have often had a hagiographical tone, Elsa Triolet was not an obvious saint; nor is she a comfortable heroine for the late twentieth century. An overweening egoist, she yet chose to live her life through men. After losing Vladimir Maiakovskii to her sister Lili Brik, she captured the French Surrealist Louis Aragon. Through him, she secured herself a presence in French letters, becoming more than just another Russian e'migre'; but at the same time she condemned herself to being known as a literary hanger-on. As soon as she found a cause, she proved capable of considerable bravery, and was decorated for her work in the French Resistance. But her wartime career is in sharp contrast to the equivocality of her behaviour in the I 930s and I 940s, when she uttered not one word in criticism of the Stalin Terror, though her Russian background put her in a position to be unusually well-informed about what was really going on.

In her early novel, Zemlianichka, Triolet employed a quotation from Mariia Bashkirtseva: 'Truth parades before me, yet flees from me.' One has the same sense on reading this biography, so assiduous is Mackinnon in avoiding the obvious about his subject. It is not clear whether the greater problem is a liberal's inability to confront the illiberal, or a sentimental gallantry, but he seems determined to see the best in what objectively seems the worst. For instance, he cites an unsavoury story about how a worker in the French Resistance named Helene Ritman was persecuted by the PCF for decades after she had failed to procure black silk stockings for Triolet, and then comments that 'the story does not directly implicate Elsa' (p. I46). He registers the fluctuations in Triolet's self-presentation, but does not consider whether there might have been problems in combining these fluctuations with a well- developed sense of personal integrity. What made Triolet fascinatingly unde- finable was also, arguably, what made her a poseur and a liar. On occasiorn, too, Mackinnon's sexually determinist view of women emerges to hilarious effect: so in the assertion: 'She may have had an abortion, she was almost certainly not a virgin, but she was not always at ease with men' (p. 32).

Unsuccessful as a straightforward narrative about, or a literary essay around, Triolet herself, the book also fails in its declared ambition of making her a representative of her generation, since the historical background is haphazardly presented. Mackinnon apparently has no knowledge of Russian; although he has made a conscientious attempt to grapple with diverse French and English sources, there are many basic misunderstandings of the Russian

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REVIEWS 533

literary background. Triolet's dreadful anthology La poesie russe (I965) is rightly described as the 'grey' and 'serviceable' effort of a 'fellow-traveller', but Mackinnon then adds that it is 'surprising' that Pasternak's Zhivago poems should not be included in it (p. I 93) . Organization also lets the book down: the same material is often presented twice in contradictory forms, as in the two definitions of Socialist Realism on pages ioo and I76. Moreover, whilst Mackinnon's style has its pretensions, intelligibility is not always one of them. Take this sentence, for example: 'These suppositions are plausible because Aragon underwent great emotional and intellectual tension for his faith's sake, and accepting them must have involved some psychic reward' (p.9I). Or perhaps we are supposed to see Aragon as a ghostly character in the biography, pondering Mackinnon's suppositions?

Only in the accounts of Triolet's writings is there some lucidity and focus. Mackinnon may be over-generous to Triolet as an author, but at least he is a persuasive advocate for a reassessment of her work. These critical pieces could surely have been the starting point for a quite different biography of Triolet, one introducing (or re-introducing) her work to the Anglophone public. As it is, Mackinnon has produced a muddled and deeply disappointing study. In his acknowledgements, he thanks his publishers for maintaining their 'sorely tried' faith in the book; one senses that his own faith evaporated long before the manuscript was complete.

Christ Church CATRIONA KELLY

Oxford

Donskov, Andrew and Sokolowski, Richard, with Weretelnyk, Roman and Woodsworth, John (eds). Slavic Drama: The Question of Innovation. Proceedings. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, I99I. x + 359 pp. Notes. $30.00 + p.&p. (paperback).

THIS book contains the proceedings of a Slavic Drama Symposium held at the University of Ottawa, 2-4 May I 99 I, and consists of thirty papers on aspects of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech and Yugoslav drama, together with separate contributions from three playwrights and an interview with one of them, Tadeusz Rozewicz. The 'question of innovation' is treated very broadly and includes discussion of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century drama- tists, such as Tolstoi and Andreev, whose significance is being reassessed in the post-glasnost' climate.

In the section on Polish drama, Zbigniew Folejewski traces links between Witkiewicz and Chekhov, whilst Daniel Gerould detects continuity between Witkiewicz and the work of Slawomir Mrozek. Jozef Kelera describes (in French - all the other foreign-language contributions have been translated into English) the poetic structure of Rozewicz's plays, referring to both Wyspianski'and AlfredJarry as forerunners. Rozewicz features again, both in Bogdan Czaykowski's piece on 'poetry and anti-poetry' in Polish drama and in Halina Filipowicz's contribution in which he emerges, through his tendency to combine intertextual motifs, as a leading exponent of'post-modernist' theatre. Kazimierz Braun provides an overview of the relationship between Polish

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