The Garnett Book of Russian Verse: A Treasury of Russian Poets from 1730 to 1996 by Donald Rayfield, Jeremy Hicks, Olga Makarova, Anna Pilkington

Abstract

MLRy 98.2, 2003 537 presentation of the roman-rekonstrukstiia foreshadows the approach taken by the remaining contributors to the text as part of a social and cultural complex, which of necessity comprehends its Soviet as well as pre-Soviet provenance. Stephanie Sandler 's discussion of Shvarts's 'poetic genealogy', for instance, implicitly reinstates the inevitability of engagement with literary antecedents, through an examination of the question of 'awareness' in its relation to the tradition of the 'destiny' so frequently evoked in the Russian concept of artistic duty. Similarly, Jane Grayson's excellent discussion of the scandal surrounding the delayed publication in 1991 of Siniavskii/ Tertz's Progulki s Pushkinym is instructive about the persistence of critical regulation with regard to canonical literature, and the political uses to which such precepts have been put by such nationalist figures as Valentin Rasputin. This issue is also addressed in Kathleen Parthe and Ewa M. Thompson's discussions of Russian national identity in village prose. Parthe presents village prose as a formof conscious counter-discourse to Soviet patriotism, while Thompson, in a reading indebted to Edward Said, argues that it is a manifestation of a far longer history of Russian imperialism that has so transformed the cultural symbology as to render it almost incapable of self-reflection. Sally Dalton-Brown's article on urban prose fits rather better with Gillespie's dis? cussion of Sorokin's programmatic inscription of taboo-breaking than with Parthe's more comprehensive discussion, but, like Robert Russell's discussion of Slavkin's neglected shorter plays, and Hanna Kolb on Sokolov, contributes to the impression vividly conveyed by Reconstructing the Canon of the literary and critical variety of the decade. It is precisely in this cumulative impression of the diversity of the 'sluggish and stagnant eighties' (p. 33), rather than in its 'reconstructive' aspirations, that the strength of this collection lies. University of Exeter Carol Adlam The Garnett Book ofRussian Verse: A Treasury ofRussian Poetsfrom1730 to1996. Ed. by Donald Rayfield, with Jeremy Hicks, Olga Makarova, and Anna Pilkington . London: Garnett. 2000. xxvi + 748pp. ?25. ISBN 0-953-58782-7. In his provocative and entertaining introduction to this anthology Donald Rayfield pays due tribute to the only other similar anthology available to English-speaking students of Russian, Dimitri Obolensky's Penguin Book of Russian Verse, originally published in 1962, rescued fromoblivionby Bristol Classical Press and reissued as The Heritage Book ofRussian Verse. The present volume contains 780 poems by 75 poets as against 238 poems by 56 poets in the earlier volume. Missing from Garnett are any examples ofmedieval poetry (to be included in a future anthology fromthis press) and any living poets, with the sole exceptions of Naum Korzhavin and Sergei Mikhalkov, who appears in spite of being dismissed as a 'Stalinist lickspittle' in the introduction. The absence of important, ifcontroversial, figuressuch as Evtushenko and Voznesenskii , both well represented in Obolensky, will raise some eyebrows, but there is more than adequate compensation to be found in the presence in this anthology ofOleinikov, Arsenii Tarkovskii, and, above all, Iosif Brodskii, not to mention important woman writers such as Mirra Lokhvitskaia, Tat'iana Shchepkina-Kupernik, Nina Iskrenko, and Anna Bunina. The inclusion ofthe lattermakes the omission ofher namesake Ivan Bunin all the more surprising. Inevitably there is some overlap with Obolensky?it is inconceivable that either volume would have omitted, forinstance, Tiutchev's 'Silentium ' or Pushkin's 'Zimnii vecher'?but an opportunity may have been missed when both editors chose 'The Geese' as one of their two (out of some 250) Krylov fables. Obolensky, unsurprisingly, lacks any examples of Russian erotica, a deficiency amply remedied by the inclusion here of Ivan Barkov (the genuine version as distinct 538 Reviews from the nineteenth-century fakes). The editor admits that some readers may wish to rip out this page. If they do, they will also have to rip out the pages which contain almost equally explicit works by Iazykov, Polezhaev, and Kharms. A girl administering an enema to a eat (in Sasha Chernyi's 'Everyday Life') and a horse defecating (in Shershenevich's 'The Principle of a Fable') may also shock the unwary. There are many more conventional, but equally unexpected, delights to...