SEER, 95, 2, APRIL 2017 346 comprehensible way, and offers much practical advice on how to support bilingual children. The volume could have perhaps benefited from more substantial references to the vast scholarly literature on bilingualism and language teaching and learning, even though the contributors’ selection is justified by the fact that the guide is aimed at the general public rather than academics. On the whole, this is a very accessible book and an extremely important resource for parents and teachers of bi- and multilingual children of Polish heritage. School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Joanna Rzepa Trinity College Dublin Golburt, Luba. The First Epoch: The Eighteenth Century and the Russian Cultural Imagination. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2014. xi + 387 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 (paperback). It is, of course, an honour to review a book which has received — in addition to the AATSEEL 2015 ‘Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies’ Award and the ‘Heldt Prize’ from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies — so many accolades from other reviewers that heaping more praise on it might seem overbearing. Yet, before focusing on matters glossed over with respect to the book’s stated purpose (at least, as encoded in its title), let us start with commendations, which it eminently deserves. To begin with, it is simply a joy to read such an elegantly argued and stylistically nearly impeccable opus on one of the seminal questions occupying the Russian historical imagination to this day, namely, the paradox of Russia’s rapid rise to greatness in the eighteenth century and the seeming oblivion to which nineteenth-century Russians generally relegated the preceding era. Professor Golburt — on the basis of her close readings of selected works by Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Karamzin, Pushkin, Viazemskii, Turgenev, Tolstoi and many others — clearly shows how important eighteenth-century literature remained in the minds of nineteenth-century writers and how complex their relation to their antecedents was, especially if one accepts her own stated ‘non-linear’ approach to periodization. Her book is divided into two major parts, the first chiefly dealing with the end of the eighteenth century, entitled ‘Derzhavin’s Moment’, and the second, ‘The Fictions of the Eighteenth Century’, which deals with certain literary developments of the nineteenth century, but especially Pushkin’s and Turgenev’s receptions of the preceding epoch. Notwithstanding these two formal divisions, her book shows over and over again the unity of her conceptual design, which on the one hand overrules REVIEWS 347 any rigid boundaries separating the two centuries, and on the other, shows the necessity of such a separation in the minds of the individual participants in the historical process, which inevitably led Russia to be an entirely different entity in the nineteenth century than it was in the preceding. Her useful and detailed asides to the craft of a whole plethora of poets and writers (including such often ignored individuals as Petrov, Slovtsov, Lazhechnikov, BestuzhevMarlinskii ) contribute to, by way of what one might call her ‘open-ended closure’ approach to periodization, by far the richest appreciation of the ideas which moved Russia’s men of letters from one century to the other. There are true jewels in her close readings of contemporary poems about Catherine’s passing and Paul’s ascension to the throne (as discussed in chapters two and three), and such surprising observations as, for instance, how Pushkin might have been moved specifically by Petrov’s ways of seeking patronage for his art (p. 146). Whilst both eye-opening, these revelations enrich our perception of how literary genres retained their importance but also altered to their new historical settings. No matter how ingenuous Golburt’s readings of individual poets’ intentions and genre modifications may be, however, Russia’s entire eighteenth century does not stand out in her book as an epoch in its own right. Rather, her book is focused(exceptfortheLomonosovsub-chapter)onroughlyitslasttwodecades. She then productively shows how variedly these years were both praised and discarded by nineteenth-century writers and historians of literature. It is conceptually revealing that in the first part of her monograph Golburt refers to the entire eighteenth century as ‘Derzhavin’s Moment’, as if the years during which...
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Dec 4, 2017
Gustavo Ponciano 
Open Access
