Slovenia and the Slovenes: A Small State and the New Europe by J. s> Gow C. Carmichael Slovenia: Evolving Loyalties by John K. s> Cox (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 353 case of, say, Vladimir Stasov).Stitesfocuseson three particularmanifestations of the arts. Music is representedby two chapters, one sketchingthe contours of domestic music-making,the other chartingthe rise of concert life. Theatre is the focus of three particularlylively chapters, rich in the kind of anecdote that the stage engenders in both performers and audience. Two chapters devoted to the visual arts describe both academic institutions of Russia's capital and the representationof the country'sgeographicalinterior. Discussion of St Petersburgand Moscow dominates, yet Stites is nonetheless careful to survey urban life in the provinces, although there is no discussionof folk culture. One of the great strengthsof the book is its encyclopaedic evocation of little-knownworks of art- who, for instance, knows Catterino Cavos's opera IvanSusanin of i8i5? As Stites himself claims, 'in the fight for cultural memory, historians can recover what was once important to people without descending into antiquarianismby examining works that display the atmosphericsof the moment whey they were produced'(p.3).Naturally,Stites is alive to the way in which history affects art although not in terms of content, since that would be to reduce art to a mere mirrorof society but institutionallyand practically.Each of the fields he examines was subject to differentdevelopments,overlappingbut by no means simultaneous,as can be seen by comparing the fate of neo-classicaldrama and academic painting, or by contrastingthe importance of the ImperialAcademy of Artswith the lack of formal trainingfor musicians. As sentences such as 'Ostrovsky'smasterpiece, TheStorm (I859),rankswith the works of Fonvizin, Griboedov, Gogol, and Chekhov. It has been translated many times and much laterwas made into an opera, KayaKabanova, by Leo'sJanacek'(p. 406) suggest, Serfdom, Society andtheArtsdoes not seem to be aimed primarilyat a specialist audience. This is not, however, the same as sayingit is not scholarly,and Stiteshas synthesizeda huge amount of archival, primary and secondary material in both Russian and English. General readers, undergraduatesand graduates will be able to read Stites's 'broad canvas' (p. i) not only with pleasure but also with profit, and academics will welcome both a narrative that both enriches and challenges the perceived canon of Russian nineteenth-centuryart. All readerswill be gratefulto Yale UniversityPressfor a book that is beautifullyproduced and accessiblypriced. School of Slavonic andEastEuropean Studies PHILIP Ross BULLOCK University College London Gow, J. and Carmichael, C. Slovenia andtheSlovenes: A SmallStateandtheNew Europe.Hurst & Company, London, 2000. Xi + 234 pp. Map. Notes. Index. ?35-00; /i6-50Cox ,John K. Slovenia: Evolving Loyalties. PostcommunistStatesand Nations, i8. Routledge, London and New York, 2005. Xii + 215 pp. Notes. Select bibliography.Index. C6s.oo. BOTH these books provide competent and readable introductions to postCommunist Slovenia. Both offer sympathetic but not uncritical insights 354 SEER, 85, 2, 2007 into the achievements,predicaments,fears and complexes of a 'smallpeople, fiercelyprotective of its language-basedidentity'(Gow and Carmichael,p. 2). Overall Gow and Carmichaelwrite with a rathermore criticaledge and are more direct and argumentative.Cox's writingis more dense and allusive,and sometimes inclines to literaryand philosophicalmusing. Both starttheir surveyswith discussionsof Slovenian historyand question, in slightly different ways, the assumption that Slovenia's membership of Yugoslavia was an aberration and the widespread belief that its ending in I99i was inevitable. Gow and Carmichael argue that both royal Yugoslavia and Communist Yugoslavia were vital in shaping the Slovenian state which emerged in the I99OS. They rejectthe view that the Sloveneswere firstdenied the statehood that was their due by the Habsburgsand then forced into an unnatural union with Yugoslavia. On the contrary, Italian pressure left Slovene leaderswith little real alternativeand in the 1920S and '30s membership of Yugoslavia brought 'a modernisation and transformationof Slovene society and politics' and the 'Yugoslav framework was [...] vital for the growth of Slovene statehood and ultimate self-governance' (pp. 25, 217). The end of Communist rule was the resultnot of a dramaticchange but of a subtle shift which meant that 'the discourse on autonomy had become an agenda for independence' (p. 5I). Cox, after a more extensive treatment of Slovenes under Habsburg rule, also insiststhat 'contraryto the popularwisdom of the I99OS, Yugoslaviawas not necessarilya doomed creation from the start'. Communist rule was like 'a period of national apprenticeship,in which Slovenia matured in...