Hartley , Janet M. The Volga: A History of Russia's Greatest River (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 761 assembled on the orders of the Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s and published in the 1860s. The second section is headed ‘Texts and Translations’, though in some respects the chapters here also touch on magic and, in particular, belief. Sergei Bogatyrev meticulously deconstructs the sources on the ‘legend of the golden belt’, an apparently scandalous episode at the wedding of Vasilii II. It may have originated as just a drunken row, but it was subsequently interpreted and elaborated into a political polemic. Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov considers how the story of the toll-booths that the soul has to negotiate on its attempted ascent to heaven, derived from a vision in the tenth-century Byzantine Life of Basil the Younger, was adapted in the eighteenth century and later, with particular focus on the treatment of the toll-booth that assessed ‘magic’. Boris Uspenskij makes an intriguing case for the notion that some polite diplomatic rhetoric by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1658 was interpreted (and reported) by a Muscovite envoy as an actual pledge of subservience to the tsar. Thethirdsectionismorewordilyheaded‘Travel,TechnologyandExploration’. Here liminality knows almost no limits, as we are reminded of how much of the globe we can traverse while remaining safely within the realm of Russian Studies. Anthony Cross surveys the British in Crimea between 1774 and 1856. Elena Smilianskaia and Julia Leikin investigate a tour of Lord Effingham to the Aegean with the Russian navy in 1770. James Gibson writes on the ‘Amur question’, Alexey Postnikov chronicles an episode in the imaginary and then empirical cartography of the Arctic regions, Denis B. Shaw follows Russian expeditions to Siberia, while Simon Dixon analyses a mission to Jerusalem in 1859, which, he argues, helped shift the balance of prestige from Britain towards Russia. The horizons of Will Ryan’s interests have indeed been wide — a fact underlined by the helpful inclusion of a bibliography of his publications across nearly six decades. Clare College, Cambridge Simon Franklin Hartley, Janet M. The Volga: A History of Russia’s Greatest River. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2021. xix + 379 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £25.00. In her bid to win the musical contest in Volga-Volga (1938), the ravishing yet pure Strelka played by Liubov´ Orlova composes a paean to the ‘broad, deep, strong’ and ‘all-national’ river in which she evokes the Cossack rebels of yesteryear, warns any present-day enemies who might be listening to keep their distance and, just for good measure, slips in a reference to Stalingrad. Not SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 762 surprisingly, after a few misadventures, the song enchants the people, and the self-effacing Strelka wins the Olympiad. Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach, the real-life songwriter, had a somewhat more checkered career, becoming embroiled in a plagiarism scandal a couple of years after the release of the film, though in this case, it’s hard to imagine what he could have stolen. His ‘Song of the Volga’ is so trite there’s almost nothing proprietary about it. By the 1930s, the river was such an obvious national icon that all a savvy Stalinist versifier had to do was offer a shout-out to the great leader and a dash of Socialist Realist cheeriness. The rest, in a sense, was already built in. Janet M. Hartley’s rich overview of the history of the river addresses the mythologies surrounding the Volga but the real strength of the book lies in its sweeping coverage of the nuts-and-bolts. Starting from the age of Khazaria, Bolgar and Kievan Rus’ and running to the present, Hartley patiently chronicles the ebb and flow of political, social and economic change up and down the river. The last line of the book, ‘Without the Volga, there would be no Russia’ (p. 316), quoted from a recent Russian TV production, aptly captures the gist of the work, which is that Volga history is Russian history. Virtually everything of importance affecting the country’s development has a connection to the river, and Hartley relates virtually all of it here. This approach leads to a certain information overload as we move relentlessly from one fact...