A History of Central European Women's Writing by Celia s> Hawkesworth (review)

Abstract

500 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 referenceis impressive,but thischaptersometimesfailsto avoid soundinglike a list of ecphrastic texts. Rubins is, however, extremely interestingon Blok's use of paintingin hisverse.Drawingon existingresearchon thistheme carried out by Tat'ianaNovikova, E. A. Borisovaand G. Iu. Sternin,Rubins explores the suggestion that many of the settings and female protagoniststhat feature in Blok'searlypoems areverbal renderingsof the places and women one sees in the worksof artnouveau paintersin general, and those of the Russian artists VasiliiVasnetsov,MikhailNesterov and MikhailVrubel'and the EnglishPreRaphaelites in particular(pp. I4I-45). Chapterfivediscussesworksby theAcmeists'RussianprecursorsAnnenskii, Voloshin and Kuzmin, while chapter six contains detailed analysisof a wide range of ecphrasticverse by the Acmeist 'giants'Gumilev, Mandel'shtamand Akhmatova,as well as analysisof worksby threelesserknownAcmeists,Irina Odoevtseva, Vasilii Komarovskii and Georgii Ivanov. Rubins's discussion focuses on the aspects of their ecphrastic technique that both unite and distinguishthem and the Parnassians.While her comments on Gumilev and Mandel'shtam are somewhat predictable, Rubins's analysis of Akhmatova's ecphrastic verse is more original: she argues convincingly that Akhmatova exploited ecphrasisprimarilyto cultivateher desiredpoetic persona, creating though herreferencesto plasticimages 'aprojectionof her own fantasiesof an ideal, ravishing self' (p. 2I3). Rubins also briefly suggests an interesting modern variant of the artworksthat inspire ecphrastictexts in her discussion of Mandel'shtam'secphrasticrenderingof cinema in his I9I5 poem 'Kinematograf ' (pp. 200-01); it is disappointing, however, that she neither develops this idea nor discusses earlier writings on the cinema produced by several Symbolists. Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures is an eminently readable and useful contribution to literary scholarship for, while it has become a critical commonplace to refer to the similarities between the Parnassian aesthetic programme and that of Acmeism (as Rubins herself acknowledges,p. 4 and pp. 88-89), no comprehensive study of these influences has previouslybeen undertaken. It also gains value from those sections that situate both schools 'withinthe largercontext of theirrespectivenationalliterarytraditions'(p. 6). For this reader, this study'sgreatest merit lies in the fact that its author does not focus solely on the theoretical statements made by poets of the different movements, but instead concentrates on how their ideas find expression in theirverse. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies RACHEL MORLEY University College London Hawkesworth,Celia (ed.).A Histogy ofCentral European Women's Writing. Studies in Russia and East Europe. Palgrave, London and New York, 2001. xvii + 323 PP.Map. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?5?.??. THERE are many ways to go about writing literary history, and there is no single paradigm guaranteed to produce the most successfulresult. Single or multi-author, chronologically or conceptually organized, encyclopedic in REVIEWS 501 scope or limited to centralfigures all of these are up for grabstoday. If one wishes to present a topic of such enormous geographical and linguisticrange and chronological sweep as women's writing in Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the present, however, multiple authorshipis the only feasible strategy. And when one considersjust how little even the vast majority of specialistsin the literaturesand cultures of this region know about women's writing, then Celia Hawkesworth's choice to emphasize inclusivity makes sense. As she puts it in her introduction: 'Because this is a pioneering work, our aim has been to provide essential information about as many of these women and their works as possible, in order to give a full account of the subject and to serve as the basis for further research' (p. x). In this, Hawkesworthhas undoubtedlysucceeded. The curiousbrowsercan open this book, whose eighteen chapters are generally organized chronologically, to practically any page and discover nuggets of suggestive information about a host of more or less forgotten literary figures who worked from the middle ages until today in Croatia, the Czech lands, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, or Slovenia. There is only one hitch: this is not a book for reading. That is to say, while each separate chapter is in its own way informative, the volume lacks coherence and so as a whole it is far less than the sum of its parts. A certain unevenness is inevitable and forgivable in a book with contributions from more than a dozen authors. However, the unevenness of this collection is conceptuallyproblematic.Some contributorsconsiderworksdirectedtowards women readers, while others only include works by women...