Pristed, Birgitte Beck The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 555 Soviet lyric and its development by three female poets, concluding that ‘[w]omen’s lyric subjectivity is human lyric subjectivity, which is no small achievement’ (p. 241). Ilya Kukulin’s contribution focuses on contemporary narrative poetry, in particular the new ways in which it presents and talks about history. In the volume’s final chapter, Boris Wolfson examines new drama, a loose set of texts connected by the persistent presence of violence and a pervasive motif of disappearance along with a specific approach to performance. This richly detailed compendium of essays will be of interest to scholars, students of contemporary Russian literature and culture, and pedagogues; for the latter group especially so if utilized in tandem with Late and Post-Soviet Literature: a Reader (Boston, MA, 2014), also edited by Lipovetsky. Sewanee: The University of the South Elizabeth Skomp Pristed, Birgitte Beck. The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, 2017. xvii + 343 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €106.99:£74.50. Birgitte Beck Pristed’s well-researched and generously illustrated book is a ground-breaking study of contemporary Russian book design. As the author states in her Introduction, ‘Post-Soviet book covers are striking and confusing’. Taking this challenging formula as her premise, Pristed embarks on a mission to elucidate ‘the obtrusive but largely ignored problem of the visual representation of fiction in contemporary Russian book design’ (p. 1). She begins by explaining the main reasons why the rapidly evolving market of Russian book covers merits academic attention: first, they offer a unique material for analysis that illustrates a radically changing notion of literature; secondly, ‘cover images are consciously and often aggressively used to position contemporary Russian prose’; and, thirdly, one can find among the covers of mass-published post-Soviet series ‘gems from experimental designers, whose advanced artistic conceptualizations of the book are different from but not inferior to the book art of the 1920s avant-garde and the 1970s underground Moscow conceptualists’ (p. 2). Following these magisterial guidelines, Birgitte Beck Pristed attempts to position her research between the disciplines of literary studies, book history, visual and media studies, while examining contrasting Western and Soviet theoretical ideas of the book. The volume under review unfolds along three main thematic axes which correspond structurally to its three parts. Part one covers Russian book design from the Soviet period to the present; part two is devoted to changing values SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 556 in the visual representation of literature; and, finally, part three, entitled ‘Three Generations of Russian Book Designers’, deals with the individual works of three contemporary Russian book designers, Arkadii Troianker, Andrei Bondarenko and Aleksandr Utkin. Each part is further divided into sections (ranging between three to four chapters in each). If the first part, as mentioned above, surveys a graphic cultural history of fiction publishing in Russia, the second is more analytically-oriented, in which Pristed systematically compares the covers of a selection of Russian editions of three literary works that represent ‘respectively, a piece of classic, popular, and contemporary fiction’ (p. 3). Pristed approaches several book design cases as examples of a concrete publishing product and as objects of visual analysis. Her three case studies focus on the pre-Revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet editions of Anton Chekhov’s short story, ‘Dama s sobachkoi’ (‘The Lady with the Little Dog’); the Russian book covers of the English crime story, The World in My Pocket by James Hadley Chase; and, lastly, the many Russian editions of Viktor Pelevin’s 1999 novel, Generation ‘P’(therationaleforchoosingGeneration ‘P’was to explore visual representation strategies in the modern Russian book market). Although Chekhov, Chase and Pelevin refrain from taking an overt ideological position intheirworks,accordingtoPristedallthreewritershavebeeninstrumentalized for various political discussions and values. In all three case studies, Pristed’s aim is to analyse the changing relationship between text, image and material, and to discuss how this change impacts upon the notion of the literary work through its redesign and reinterpretation within Russian book culture. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the book reveals the mechanisms behind one of the most interesting post-Soviet publishing enterprises, the Ad...