William James in Russian Culture by Joan Delaney s> Grossman Ruth Rishchin (review)

Abstract

144 SEER, 84, I, 2oo6 effortsto reassertculturaland linguisticidentityin orderto enterthe European community. Despite its high ambition and the authors' stated position in-between the East and the West, the project seems largely untouched by the complexities and conflictedrealityof the region. The legacy of socialismcreatesan urgency that can hardly be underestimated in any explorations of Eastern Europe. And it is socialism which the budding scholars of post-socialist studies fail to addressin theoreticaland historicalterms. When EasternEuropeanslook West, they see culturalspaceswith not only contemporary, i.e. post-socialist, post-Communist or post-authoritarian,but also complex historical dimensions. When American academics of Eastern European origin (or those with an interest in the region) look East, they see themselves in the mirror of their intellectual formation. While promising engagement with a critique of ethnocentric politics, the volume remains anchored in the older and predictable geographies of identities. But perhaps this internal conflict in itself could be productive in creating an intellectual opening for much needed discussion of the Eastern European question and for recalibratingthe Westerngaze. Cultural Studies E. CHMIELEWSKA School ofLiteratures, Languages andCultures University ofEdinburgh FilmStudies D. OSTROWSKA School ofLiteratures, Languages andCultures University ofEdinburgh Grossman,Joan Delaney and Rishchin, Ruth (eds). William JamesinRussian Culture. Lexington Books, Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford, 2003. xi + 259 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. Priceunknown. THIS focused, well-organized collection of studies by English- and Russianspeaking scholars fills a gap and lays a foundation. It is some time since Alexander Etkind'scontroversialbooks alerted studentsof modernism to the strongtwo-wayflow of ideas and imagesbetween psychology and the arts.His 'James and Konovalov: The Varietiesof ReligiousExperience and Russian Theology between Revolutions', together with A Poole's 'WilliamJames in the Moscow Psychological Society: Pragmatism,Pluralism,Personalism'are, as it were, the core of the book, detailing reception, impact, influence, controversyand the chronology of Russian translationsofJames's works. The excellence of the volume as a whole, however, is in the contextualizing ofJames's linkswith Russianculture:fromthe percipienteditors'introduction through considerations of 'The European Connection' (Linda Simon); of James as a reader of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi (Robin Feuer Miller, Donna Tussing Orwin and Andrew Wachtel); of early interest aroused by James's ideas amongst multi-lingualpoets and thinkerssuch as Ivan Konevskoi and Viacheslav Ivanov, who did not have to wait for translations(Joan Delaney Grossmanand Gennady Obatnin);of the predictablynegative reaction of Lev REVIEWS I45 Shestov to the optimistic pragmatism of James's 'Will to believe' (Brian Horrowitz); of the exploitation of Jamesian ideas by Gor'kii and, more particularly,by Bogdanov in the exercise of 'god-building' (BarryP. Scherr); and of the revival of interest in post-Soviet Russia (Edith W. Clowes), on to David Joravsky's judicious afterword. Joravsky highlights two significant dismissalsof James, by Lenin in I908 and by Zenkovskiiin I948, the firstof which sets the patternfor Soviet rejectionof 'capitalistpragmatism'while the second warned against interpreting the Orthodox Christian teaching of 'activity in the world' 'in the spirit of that primitive pragmatism which has been expressed with such seductive naivete by William James' (p. 233). James's combination 'of psychological science and philosophical inquiry within the imagination of a romantic writer, each element of the complex union constantlychallenging and provokingthe other' (p. 226) was, nevertheless , tremendouslyappealingto thinkingRussiansof the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries.Joravsky'safterwordfirmlyre-establishesthe connection with imaginativeliteratureat a time when the linkbetween suchliteratureand psychological science was at its closest and the one learned from the other:as, for example, James learned from Tolstoi and Dostoevski and Konevskoi and Viacheslav Ivanov learned from James. James's interest in psychic research and spiritismprovides a timely reminder of how 'normal', even 'advanced' the practice of seance and table-turning must have seemed to the likes of Valerli Briusov. Florenskii,familiarwith F. W. H. Myers rather than James from Lopatin'slectures at Moscow University, even feared back in 1904 that the State might 'impose' spiritismas a positivist surrogatefor religion, a new way of controllingmen's minds. Likeall good books, thisone leaves the readerhungryformore. There is no mention, for instance, of WilliamJames's brother, Henry. Was he, perhaps, little read in Russia -or is it that he might have merited a companion volume? Department ofRussian Studies AVRIL PYMAN University ofDurham Masalskis...