Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen Jacob Emery Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature. Ed. by Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen. Cambridge: Open Book. 2021. xvii+302 pp. £29.95. ISBN 978–1–80064–120–4. From the first pages of its brilliant Introduction, this volume makes plain the blind spots in received notions of intertextuality and argues persuasively for reading out [End Page 529] of sequence. A genealogical scheme in which elements pass from origin texts to successors falsifies the experience of literature in crucial respects. For example, a reader initially acculturated to contemporary fiction approaches literature of prior epochs through paradigms derived from modern writing; hermeneutic frameworks such as the fourfold exegesis of medieval scholars assume a textual structure of anticipation rather than recollection; and coincidence often registers as meaningful resonance for readers who recognize commonalities across authors who could not have known of one another. The intertextual methodologies that take pride of place in doctoral examinations may have various institutional advantages, but they sideline essential intuitions of comparative literature. In their framing essay, editors Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen build on the Oulipian observation that all texts possess incidental features, any of which might conceivably reappear as purposive qualities in a future text, to offer a genuinely exciting and insightful account of literature: rigorously theorized, slightly perverse, charged with appreciation for the fictional word, and worked into an informative and splendidly argued panorama of ramifications. The essays that follow, which are of consistently high quality and intellectual daring, provide proof of the concept, and the fact that one or two of the strongest among them would probably be mutilated into insignificance by the peer-review process is a powerful indictment of academic narrow-mindedness. The body of the collection is organized around the canonical figures of Nikolai Gogolʹ, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi. Langen's lively and sprawling triangulation of Gogolʹ with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and Flann O'Brien (all three theorists of anticipatory plagiarism after a fashion) is a standout, as is Ilya Vinitsky's intermedial treasure hunt 'Seeing Backwards: Raphael's Portrait of Nikolai Vasilʹevich Gogolʹ. In the section on Dostoevskii, which is devoted to authors who openly exploit Dostevskian subtexts, two pieces lapse into intertextual exploration in which the conceit of anticipatory plagiarism is largely ornamental; in the third, Inna Tigountsova acknowledges modern literature's evident debt to Dostoevskii by imagining a far-future reader for whom the surviving fragments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature have come to seem a single corpus with members produced over the course of several centuries, something like the Homeric Hymns. Moving on to Tolstoi, we find a Levinasian reading by Steven Shankman; Maguire's highly entertaining essay on the reciprocal echoes between Tolstoi and popular novelist Hall Caine; and Svetlana Yefimenko's provocative contribution to the dispute between epic and novel, which suggests that Homer's Achilles makes better sense if he is read as having interiority of the kind ascribed to Tolstoi's Bolkonskii—in other words, that the atypical features of this epic hero become perfectly legible when read as an anachronistic feature of another genre of another age. The conceit of anticipatory plagiarism seems most bracing and fecund when the authors under discussion could not have known each other or when they write in radically different genres. In the face of demonstrable influence, scholars often revert to presumptions of cause and effect that do not disturb received methodologies in any essential way. Eric Naiman in his excellent Afterword worries that 'influence backwards can begin to resemble a kind of scholarly pig-Latin [. . .] [End Page 530] reminiscent of a game show where all the answers have to be phrased as questions' (p. 226)—but goes on to justify the enterprise with a sequence of dazzling aperçus that show anticipatory plagiarism to be embedded in the projects of Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Nabokov, and Proust. A vital rethinking of intertextuality by and for people who are alive to the literary imagination, this anthology maintains a high standard, occasionally surpassed by its most brilliant members, and deserves a fruitful afterlife...