Time of Trouble: Violence in Russian Literature and Culture by Marcus Levitt , Tatyana Novikov (review)

Abstract

530 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20I0 self in the image of the archetype [ofChrist]' (p. 68), and Tolstoi, through Nekhliudov, offers 'the possibility of a new communitas, a resacralisation of society' (p. 85). At the centre of the collection of essays are six chapters that focus exclusively on the laterworks ofDostoevskii: one on The Brothers Karamazov, two on The Idiot, one on Demons, with the remaining two ranging more broadly on the function of hagiography and on holy (and unholy) fools. The stimulus for several of the essays is a key idea or concept taken from an earlier critic that is first summarized and then extended or qualified in meaning by the author: Bakhtin, Auerbach and Girard are the threemost prominent sources in this respect. These exercises, all well informed by an extensive knowledge of text and context, possess the depth and dexterity to provide valuable insights for an undergraduate readership but, because theywere not originally conceived as part of a unified monograph, there is a substantial degree of overlap from chapter to chapter in some of the examples repeatedly cited (such as Sonia's reading of the storyofLazarus toRaskol'nikov in Cnrne andPunishmentand the symbolism ofHolbein's depiction of the dead Christ inThe Idiot) that leaves the reader with a sense of thinness of interpre tative range. The tide of the book is taken from the penultimate essay, 'The Poetry of Prose: The Art of Parallelism inTurgenev's Fathers and Sons'. It is here that Jostein Bortnes's idea ofwhat constitutes thepoetry ofprose comes to the fore. In direct reference to thisphrasing, he writes 'it is in the creation of complex relationships between [the] themes in the lives of themain characters that Turgenev shows his art, his poetry of prose' (p. 183). The point ismade in respect of Turgenev rather than Dostoevskii, and many readers may feel that this is appropriate. The last chapter takes Bakhtin to Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in an attempt, following Bakhtin, to see genres not as essences or types, but as 'form-shaping ideologies' inwhich hagiography interfereswith other orientations. Department ofLiterature, Film, and Theatre Studies Leon Burnett Universityof Essex Levitt,Marcus and Novikov, Tatyana (eds). Times ofTrouble: Violence inRussian Literature and Culture.University ofWisconsin Press, Madison, WI and London, 2007. + 324 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. ?40.95. Edited byMarcus C. Levitt and Tatyana Novikov, this collection of essays explores the roles and meanings of violence inRussian society and culture from theMongol invasion to the twenty-firstcentury. The chapters range fromMikhail Lermontov's Romanticism (Daniel Powelstock), through state violence in the Stalin period (J. Arch Getty) to the prose ofDaniel Kharms (Mark Lipovetsky) and revenge fantasies in Nina Sadur's stories (Tatyana Novikov). Levitt's introduction emphasizes violence ? enacted, remembered represented ? within Russian culture over 1,000 years but neglects the broader European context. He points to cthe Russian cultural imperative to REVIEWS 531 mythologise violence, Russians' preoccupation with making sense of it and coming up with narratives within which to interpret national traumas and dislocations' (p. 5). True, Russia has experienced high levels of violence in its past, both distant and recent, and its assimilation, representation and mythologization have played an important role in the evolution of Russian culture. But what are the points of comparison here? Europe during the Wars ofReligion? The revolution and its legacy in France? Ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe during the firsthalf of the twentieth century and its resur gence with powerful mobilizing ideologies of hatred in the 1990s? Commem orations of the violence of the Second World War? The mythologies of political violence in Ireland in the twentieth century?Violence in European cinema? From thisperspective, violence both actual and imaginary seems less to setRussia apart from itsneighbours as to bind it to them. 'Purges, pogroms and theGulag' may all be distinctivelyRussian tomodern ears, as the cover of the book tellsus, but one does not have to look very far to find equivalent terms in a host of other European societies. Claims for exceptionalism aside, Levitt is undoubtedly correct, however, that violence has shaped Russia's political imagination. Russian thinkers, writers and artists have repeatedly turned to representations of violence as an imaginative resource with which to ponder such...