928 Reviews Poets represented include the thoroughly canonical (in terms of the undergraduate syllabus), such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev, as well as the less obvious (Zinaida Gippius, Georgii Ivanov). Perhaps most demanding for the inexperienced reader is the conclusion, which selects poems by twentieth-century emigres in order to reflect on the relationship between poetry, marked by patterning and order, and the 'unpoetic' world which is often chaotic and disconcerting. The decision to focus on developments related to genre in the second part of this book does inevitably raise the question of literary history. While the preface makes it quite clear that the book is not a history of Russian poetry, the introduction offers a six-page survey, tracing the development of poetry from the Petrine era to the late twentieth century. Inevitably, such brevity produces a foreshortened view, but the treatment of Soviet poetry reinforces the simplistic binary model, according towhich 'official' poets were sycophants of limited ability (with the exception ofMaiakovskii), and talent and originality were to be found only among the nonconformists who emerged after Stalin's death. This model unhelpfully reproduces, albeit with reversed polarities, the one used by the Soviet state to impose apparently clear-cut divisions on a reality inwhich the boundaries were farmore blurred and mutable. The book is not, however, a history of Russian poetry, but 'a guide to reading, interpreting, and appreciating it' (p. ix). This aim ismost certainly achieved. For the reader who will enjoy the realization that Russian poetry displays a richness and complexity of interrelationships such as those that can be found between metre, rhythm, and meaning, or between a single poem and the expectations which surround ideas of genre, this book offers a concise and concentrated account of the things that poets can do with words, and readers with texts. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER KATHARINE HODGSON Ovid and theModerns. By THEODOREZIOLKOWSKI. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2005. Xvi+262 pp. $39.95; ?22.95. ISBN o-80o4-4274-5. From antiquity until the end of the eighteenth century, Ovid held a position of influ ence in theWestern literary and artistic tradition that was unrivalled even, arguably, by Virgil, only then to suffer a catastrophic decline in reputation. In the years leading up to the new millennium, in novels such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses or translations and adaptations such as Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid, Ovid became an increasingly recognizable figure, suggesting that, even if this was not the dawn of a new aetas Ovidiana comparable to that of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the poet's stock was at least rising (Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, the editors of the collection After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), felt able to say that 'Ovid is once again enjoying a boom' (p. xi)). Ovid's influence earlier in the twentieth century on Joyce, Pound, and Eliot was acknowledged but largely uninvestigated in detail; and, notwithstanding the interesting final chapters in Sarah Annes Brown's The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London: Duckworth, I999), the gradual rehabilitation of Ovid in the course of the century and the extent and nature of his influence remained largely uncharted territory. This book, a companion volume to Ziolkowski's magisterial Virgil and theModerns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I993), fills this gap admirably. A broadly chronological survey takes its readers from early Modernism through what Ziolkowski describes as the annus mirabilis Ovidianus of I922 (Eliot's The Waste Land, Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, and Mandlestam's Tristia) down to the bewildering explosion of 'Ovidian' literature over the past few years. Ziolkowski's synthesis allows one to see for the first time how important a role Ovid has played in the twentieth-century imagina tion. He approaches this material not as a classicist (though he has a thorough and MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 929 sympathetic knowledge of Ovid's texts and of the scholarship on them), but as a comparatist and student ofmodern literature with an unusually broad range and bib liographical command. Though the undisputed major landmarks receive extended and judicious treatment, what marks this book out is its extraordinary collection of twentieth-century 'Ovidiana', some of...
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Jun 1, 2007
Michel Morange 
Open Access