Mondry, Henrietta Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 330 Mondry, Henrietta. Political Animals: Representing Dogs in Modern Russian Culture. Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics, 59. Brill Rodopi, Leiden and Boston, MA, 2015. xviii + 389 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €95.00 (paperback). Henrietta Mondry’s book is obviously a labour of love. She has done a tremendous amount of research, as is reflected in her analyses, footnotes and bibliography. (By the way, a book she cites, Censorship in Soviet Literature: 1917–1991, is by Herman Ermolaev, not Nikolaev.) Her interest in her topic began, she explains, when she read Boris Uspenskii’s ideas about ambivalent attitudes toward dogs in Slavic folk culture. The territory explored includes, among others, pagan and Christian beliefs about dogs; information about attitudes toward dogs and other animals in Russian and other cultures; approaches to the role of dogs in Russian literature and culture, primarily nineteenth and twentieth century, although there is some discussion of pre-nineteenth-century (the dog heads on the saddles of Ivan the Terrible’s oprichniki, and Krylov, for example) and twenty-firstcentury images; Buddhism; antisemitism; children’s literature; animal training practices; conjectures about the link of some of the material discussed to Nikolai Fedorov’s ideas; Pavlov’s experiments on dogs; statues in honour of Laika, the first dog in space; and science fiction. Specific works discussed include those by obscure writers and those of well-known writers such as Gogol´, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, Chekhov, Remizov, Maiakovskii, Zamiatin, Bulgakov, Shalamov, Vladimov and Pelevin. A challenge of amassing so much material, Mondry admits, is how to organize it. She writes that given the overlapping categories into which she organizes her materials, analyses of the same work appear in more than one section of her book. This results in many repeated statements such as ‘As was stated earlier’ (p. 82); and ‘As was stated earlier in the book’ (p. 318). Since some works, such as White Bim, Black Ear, for example, are analysed from different perspectives, in different sections of the book, it would have been helpful to have a title-author index. There is a useful subject index. Mondry’s focus, she states, is on the image of a dog as a political construct, on ‘the cultural construct of intersections in the politics of class, estate, race, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, and, paradoxically, of ArcadianandUtopiandreamsandscientificdeeds’(p.26).Herbook,shewrites, is organized into four ‘thematic clusters’ (p. 27). Part one focuses on ‘the shift in dog-human hierarchies’ (p. 27) from serfdom and on cruel behaviour toward people and dogs. Part two addresses ‘narratives of partnership between dogs and various disempowered humans’, especially emphasizing victimization. Part three considers Soviet and dissident takes on ‘dogs in service to their country, dogs in the police service, prison camp guard dogs and border dogs’ (p. 27). Part four considers ‘narratives of transition, transformation, and transgression’, including the link between ‘metaphysical and scientific REVIEWS 331 transformation themes’ (p. 27). She talks about ambivalent attitudes toward dogs and about paradoxes. Mondry highlights the importance of Aesopian language, given the presence of Russian and Soviet censorship. This approach works well in the case, for example, of Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan and Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Her attention to science is good. Thus, her emphasis upon Bulgakov’s A Dog’s Heart in the context of real-life scientific experimentation is good, as is her attention to the link between the Soviet emphasis on the importance of scientific progress and her discussion of the role of dogs in Soviet works. Also good are her observations about post-human hybridization in Oleg Kulik’s ‘Family of the Future’, in which he would like to father an offspring whose mother would be a dog. More problematic are certain interpretations that do not fit the context of the individual work under discussion. Among these interpretations, I shall focus on two representative examples. While Mondry correctly does mention the importance of questions of justice as a theme in Ivan Karamazov’s conversation with Alesha about the suffering of innocent children, she incorrectly states that part of the episode with the general ordering his dog to attack the child who has thrown a stone at it, has...