Festschrift in Honour of Arnold McMillin by Irene Zohrab (review)

Abstract

336 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 fiction' (p. 59), and a frustratingly brief account of the unusually intense reflexivityof the I959 version (p. 250). Thomson is more comfortable with a traditionalframeworkwhere the role played by the novelist character Firsov is to serve 'as a mouthpiece for ideas that for one reason or another Leonov does not wish to statein his own name' (p. 59). (This is a recurrentidea, and a source of some contradiction:although Leonov is said to have 'entrustedhis boldest ideas to the enemy' [p. 23I] for safety'ssake,elsewhere,by allowing a negative character to quote from one of his earlier novels, Leonov is apparently 'making clear his dissociation from the idea' [p. 350, n. 56].) Traditionalmethodology thus limits engagement with the full implications of Leonov's most interestingand complex novel (thesame is trueof the approach to the narrativeintricacies of Dorogana Okean, although the treatment of the representationof the artistand artin Skutarevskii and in Piramida is slightlyless perfunctory).Perhaps,however,we can detect in his comment that 'no serious analysis of the book has yet appeared' (p. 75), an expression of the selfconsciousness or autocriticismwhose importance in VorThomson does not fullyappreciate. Department ofRussian andSlavonic Studies DAVID SHEPHERD University ofSheffield Zohrab, Irene (ed.). Festschrift in Honourof ArnoldMcMillin. New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 36. School of Asian and European Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 2002. xxvii + 326 pp. Illustrations. Notes. NZ$5o.oo (overseas); NZ$45.oo (New Zealand). WITH contributionsranging from shortverse and fiction to academic articles on Russian and Belarusian literature and music, the present volume of New ZealandSlavonic Journal(NZSJ) is a suitable Festschriftin honour of Arnold McMillin, professorof Russian Literatureat the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL. ProfessorMcMillin's expertiseis as wide-ranging as the collection under review. Of the verse and short fiction, Dmitrii Prigov's 'Stikhi k 6o-iiu A Makmillina' are light and amusing. Vasilii Aksenov's story, Anglichanin i emigranty, is a scarcely veiled, though by no means scandalous, recount of a meeting between the author and ProfessorMcMillin. Vladimir Voinovich's Potok soznaniia consistsof a mere four-and-a-half-pageparagraphof stream-ofconsciousness . Zinovii Zinik's near stream-of-consciousness contribution, Macdonalds of theWorldUnite.!, includes paragraph breaks and some amusing asides,but failed to impressthisreader. The Traum Prison(A Parable) by Belarus's Vasil Bykaul,who died in June 2003, is a strong but concise story. Its rather pessimistic conclusion - that man ultimately prefers manna to freedom -echoes the argument made by Dostoevskii's Grand Inquisitor. But in the context of Belarus, the story may also have a contemporarypolitical meaning. REVIEWS 337 Joe Andrew's discussion of Dostoevskii's WhiteJights examines its 'key chronotopes'in an effortto explain 'theconstraintsplaced on men andwomen and how [Dostoevskii understands] they might, or might not, escape from them' (p. 25). After paying his debts to Bakhtin and Gary Rosenshield, Andrew offersseveralfascinatingobservations,not least of which is the story's 'ambivalent' image of the male (p. 32). Nonetheless, says Andrew, Dostoevskii 'streatmentof the male and female stereotypesin the storyis 'notasradical as some have recently claimed' (p. 34). Despite 'problematizing'gender and victimization, in the end the story shows that 'a woman's love is not to be trusted'(p. 35). Knut AndreasGrimstad'sarticleon Gogol"s Taras Bul'batakesmany (albeit entertaining) pages to state the obvious: that the story is rife with 'the flight from the feminine', 'scorn for ethnic foreignness, or Polishness'(p. I I6), and even the fusion of Ukrainian identity into Great Russian (p. 125). Gogol' was hardly alone in these sentiments. Perhaps a more surprisingarticle will one day uncover the hidden love for foreignersand 'flightfrom the masculine' in nineteenth-centuryersatzCossackliterature. In her article, Mary Hobson convincingly shows the influence of the first five chapters of the book of Isaiah on Griboedov's Woe from Wit,even if the final version of the play did not fully convey the author's initial prophetic intentions. However, Hobson's assertion that the Bible was 'of course' not translated into Russian until I875-76 is incorrect (p. I30), thoughthisdoes not change her argument. Among articleson twentieth-centuryfiction, Michael Kirkwood'scomparison of the 'nightmare worlds' (p. I43) of Franz Kafka and Aleksandr Zinov'ev...