The Cambridge Companion to Pushkin by Andrew Kahn (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 519 explanation is followed by examples which the author also uses to reflect on differences in alphabet, pronunciation and vocabulary of the three national languages. The last six chapters comprise the Sociolinguistic Commentary. Each of the two parts has its own subject index, the entire book is cross referenced and accompanied byword indexes forboth BCS and English. The onlymissing segment, perhaps, is a bibliography. The book could be used both as a reference by learners and scholars and as a resource for self-study. It could be used to accompany the Bosnian, Croatian,Serbian:A Textbookor independently. It is systematically organized, well written and innovative. It challenges some of the categorizations of traditional grammar in the most common areas (pronunciation, word order, classifica tion of verbs, sentence typology, etc.) and presents some of the topics in a new light. It is clearly a learner-centred resource and the author's long and rich teaching experience is evident on every page. Grammatical topics are presented from a comparative perspective. They contain brief encounters with English grammar aiming to refer to what the learner is familiar with and at the same time to underline similarities and differences between English and BCS. In thisway students are encouraged tomake the most of the grammatical explanations. They are directly engaged in the exploration of the grammar instead of having to commit rules to memory without really understanding how they work. In addition, one should not fail to commend the vocabulary-building points in some later chapters where the author focuses on words or phrases that may well fall between grammar and vocabulary and are not usually explained or codified (such as verbs of transport, verbs of body position, etc.). The author's detailed and lucid presentation of the facts, togetherwith her finely-balanced judgements and persuasive insightsmakes Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian:A Grammarwith Sociolinguistic Commentary a book that should be on the shelves of every linguist dealing with BCS. Ronelle Alexander has provided students and scholars with a reliable and comprehensive guide for further study in the linguistics of this language/these languages. UCL SSEES Jelena Calic Kahn, Andrew (ed.). The CambridgeCompanion toPushkin. Cambridge Univer sityPress, Cambridge and New York, 2006. xv + 238 pp. Chronology. Map. Illustrations.Notes. Guide to furtherreading. Index. ?17.99: $34.99 (paperback). Aleksandr Pushkin is a perfect figure for a volume of this sort: as a form, the companion is necessarily constraining, and Pushkin's ability to transcend constraint (whether self-willed or externally imposed) encourages in the best of his commentators a like virtue. His short yet busy life can be happily summarized (as it ishere by David Bethea and Sergei Davy do v); the concision of his writing ? both in terms of style and of length ? warns against prolixity; and what Andrew Kahn identifies in his introduction as 'the essential mobility of Pushkin's thinking,which preferred play and openness to definitive answers, and ironyand ambiguity to didacticism' (p. 1)promotes the 520 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 celebration of the open, the provisional and the downright contradictory over any assertion of authority (which perhaps makes Pushkin an author for our own times too). Moreover, of all 'canonical' Russian authors, he arguably benefitsmost from inclusion in a series such as the Cambridge Companions toLiterature; despite the regard inwhich he isheld both inhis homeland and by scholars, his genius is often difficult to characterize for the 'students of Pushkin and Russian literature' (p. 6) at whom this collection is aimed. Kahn has assembled an impressive group of scholars from across theworld, many of whom have written longer studies of Pushkin and all of whom are well placed to offer shorter, thoughtfulpieces from thevantage-point of experience and knowledge. Two chapters by Kahn and Marcus Levitt (on 'Pushkin's Lyric Identities' and Evgenii Onegin respectively) set the tone for the volume as a whole. They are in no way cribs, compressed summaries of the composition and interpreta tion of thesemost canonical texts ? and indeed how could theybe? Rather, Kahn traces themes such as imitation and originality, prophecy and friend ship, the identityof the poet and the interpolation of the reader, which equip the reader with new skillsforgoing back to thepoetry...