Russia and Soul: An Exploration by Dale Pesmen (review)

Abstract

854 Reviews a contemptuous health system?are admirably demarcated. The author also offers abundant statistics concerning the city of Zhdanov; the pretensions of Little Vera towards documentary verisimilitude necessitate this explanatory setting of authentic facts and figures for those pretensions to be assessed, for claustrophobia to be explained and Pichul's nasty inversion of socialist realist 'typicality' to be justified. Beardow's brief overview of Soviet youth filmsis extremely useful; although short, ithas an intriguingbreadth, commencing with Krasnye d'iavoliata (1923) and Fedliina Pravda, thus proffering a helpful blueprint for future research. Finally, in a fitting reflection of multiplicity at the end of a regime and a study of centralized cinema's decline, this monograph concludes with a collection of sometimes contradictory (or silly) responses from the Western press and interviews with the central actors. By positioning Pichul's sometimes irritatinglypreachy filmamid a large number of opi? nions, Beardow commendably avoids a grim or somewhat unsophisticated dismissal of the film as bad-tempered chernukha and stresses instead the messy disintegration of a distressed medium. University of California at Los Angeles David MacFadyen Russia and Soul: An Exploration. By Dale Pesmen. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2000. xii + 364pp. ?19.95. ISBN 0-8014-8709-9. Dale Pesmen's ambitious cosmological reflectionson the concept ofsoul, dusha, spring from reminiscences of her several visits to and stays in the provincial west Siberian city of Omsk in the period 1990-94, just before and just afterthe demise of the Soviet Union. Her book has a complexity that Pesmen considers 'iconic of the complexity' of her subject. For 'the life ofthe soul', she explains, is also complex, and an attempt 'to make an utterly coherent thing' out of all her material 'would have just reduced it' (p. 13). She therefore feels free to incorporate material of many differentsorts and registers, such as character sketches, reports ofconversations, stories, and jokes, as well as reflections on such matters as hospitality, materialism, and authority. The steam bath, or bania, features prominently, on the grounds that this institution apparently resembles dusha, inasmuch as the bania too is a place 'where you become aware of things and of oppositions' (p. 111). Much of the book is taken up with description of and reflection on social intercourse at the dinner table, both because people tend to be especially voluble there on the subject of dusha and because hospitality, Pesmen believes, is 'a primary way ofcreating dusha' (p. 157). (A curious lacuna, given that the book explores 'soul', is the absence of consideration of religious life in Omsk; at least, the author seems not to have set foot in a church or conversed with anyone of strong religious faith.) In between the bouts of flagellation with birch besoms and the heavy consumption of local victuals and alcoholic infusions Pesmen undertakes further 'fieldwork' (p. 4), gathering knowledge of the natives by means of tape-recorded interviews with twenty-six acquaintances between the ages of eleven and seventy-five. Believing that 'searches fordefinitions alone won't work on a term like dusha' (p. 9), Pesmen eschews an exclusively semantic examination of the concept and at the same time refrainsfroma mere attempt to describe mentality or national character. For both approaches, she complains, mistakenly 'buy into soul's deceptive thingness' (p. 15). Russian soul, for Pesmen, is not merely 'a myth, a notion, an image, a consoling fic? tion, and a nationalist trope, it is also ways in which people did things and what they did' (p. 12). It is forthis reason that she deals 'with drinking, steam bathing, and other "souls" that have more to do with what happens than with what people have' (p. 9). Heavily influenced by modish Bakhtinian concepts, she arrives at an interpretation of soul as 'always from some point of view', 'not subject to context-freedefinition', an MLRy 99.3, 2004 855 'unfinalized, unanalyzable inner [core] of moral issues inseparable from a person's image', something 'alive, that is, played out between consciousnesses' (pp. 275-76). Readers may find it difficult to decide as what genre they should read Pesmen's book. In so faras it records the experience of an isolated foreigner in an environment...