That Savage Gaze: Wolves in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Imagination by Ian M. Helfant (review)

Abstract

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 538 allusive, and also emotionally persuasive. In commenting on Batiushkov’s adaptations, Professor France proves an expert guide on their closeness to originals as reworkings or translations; and on a larger scale France’s treatment of literary culture in the period deserves to be appreciated on its own terms as a refresher course rather than the dernier cri in scholarship. Graduate students and scholars in the period will inevitably turn to the more specialized studies of, for example, Igor´ Pil´shchikov on Batiushkov’s Italian influences, Mariia Maiofis on Arzamas, Oleg Proskurin on literary debates, and probably Lotman and Uspenskii on linguistic controversies. The translations of shorter poems are often equimetrical and also reproduce rhyme, adding to the brio. The longer poems are rendered with a grace and clarity that takes them beyond the standard of cribs. Comments on form supplement translation helpfully. Nothing, one imagines, could work better in classes on Russian poetry of the Pushkin period. The Russian Library series is working wonders to bring to readers of English new voices as well as classics newly rendered. St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford Andrew Kahn Helfant, Ian M. That Savage Gaze: Wolves in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Imagination. The Unknown Nineteenth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2018. xxvi + 174 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $99.00. A 1994 US government document, The Reintroduction of Gray Wolves to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho, contains an interesting correspondence between an American ecologist, querying the accuracy of Russian anti-wolf research cited by an objector to the Yellowstone project, and Professor Bibikov, a wolf specialist at Moscow’s Academy of Sciences. Bibikov responds that the case against wolves is much exaggerated and largely based on speculation, or spurious research presented in Russian and Soviet hunting magazines. That Savage Gaze, Ian Helfant’s study of changing Russian cultural perceptions of the wolf between 1861 and 1917, discusses wolves in literary fiction by Tolstoi, Chekhov and others; but its great strength is its analysis of that much-maligned yet widely influential genre of hunting magazines and popular science. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the volchii vopros, or ‘wolf question’, was debated from different social perspectives in hunting societies and their journals, individual hunters’ memoirs and zoological treatises. Helfant’s assimilation and analysis of this diversity of sources is a triumph of archival research, which goes far to alleviate the lack of systematic data on Russian wolf populations lamented REVIEWS 539 in his Introduction. The wolf was a symbol of Russian strength and ferocity; hunting and killing it was the ultimate rite of masculinity. Conversely, the wolf’s persistence also symbolized economic backwardness; 1873 statistics from Russia’s Ministry of the Interior suggested that lupine depredations on livestock and game were costing the Russian economy fifty million rubles annually, not to mention the hundred or so peasants devoured every year. Helfant argues that, despite this conflict, both fictional interpretations and legal and scientific literature about the wolf expressed increasing empathy with their subject (the 1865 foundation of the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals [RSPA] was a milestone in this journey). That Savage Gaze never strays far from Tolstoi. It opens with an analysis of the famous Rostov wolf hunt from War and Peace and turns in its final chapter to an 1890 essay, ‘A Wicked Pastime’ by Tolstoi’s protégé Vladimir Chertkov, describing a moral epiphany during a wolf hunt. Other wolffriendly authors discussed by Helfant include Chekhov (twice), Boris Zaitsev and Lidiia Zinovieva-Annibal; each story is examined in the context of wider literature on the same aspect of wolf ecology. The hunting scenes in War and Peace, when re-read beside memoirs by obscurer authors as well as accounts from contemporary hunting journals, reveal an entire lost economy and vocabulary of wolf-hunting based around borzoi packs, which finally became financially unsustainable towards the end of the century. Chief huntsmen, often more skilled than their masters, were at the top of the hunt hierarchy. (In his conclusion, Helfant reminds us of the dark side of this hunting-dominated society by citing Ivan Karamazov’s anecdote of the little...