REVIEWS 509 is made clear by the number of times his work was re-issued in translation. The dramaswhich seem to have had the most powerful influence on Tolstoi are the two Wallenstein plays and ThePiccolomini. If the 'chuzhoe slovo' in Brodskii'splay, Mramor, is seen to be self-distorting and self-parodyingin the spiritof absurdisttheatre,V. I. Dal' appearsto have been haunted throughout his life by the words and phrases of Goreot uma, which are shown constantly to resurface in his fiction, in his collections of proverbsand in his four-volumedictionaryof the 'LivingRussian Language', published during the i86os. Zhukovskii's interest in eighteenth-century sentimental drama, Kotzebue, and Frenchneo-classicial drama (a good deal of which he translated)is shown to have influenced his own practice between I805 and I8ii, whilst his translation of Schiller's TheMaid of Orleans, it is suggested,paved the way forthe dramaticachievementsof Pushkin. The contributionon recent productions of Chekhov arguesthat the lyrical traditionof Soviet Chekhovhasbeen replacedby a postmodern,experimental approach in venues as disparate as Vologda, Riga and Magnitogorsk and with, on the face of it, extremely interesting results as these affect radically innovative re-interpretations,of Chaika in particular.Lastly, one of the most taxing, as well as most stimulating, contributions to this posthumous 'Festschrift',is the essay by E. G. Shestakova devoted to Gilles Deleuze's Logique du sens,as this affects notions of the actor's stage presence in time, poised between Chronos and Aeon (or Time and Eternity).One would need to be fairlyfamiliarwith the Deleuze work (which the writerappearsto have read in Russiantranslation)to evaluatewhat seem to be very interestingideas which, here, are only outlined in a brief, but thought-provoking,exegetical summary. SchoolofHumanitiesand CulturalStudies NICKWORRALL Middlesex University Doyle, Peter. IuriiDombrovskii. Freedom under Totalitarianism.Studies in Russian andEuropeanLiterature,4. HarwoodAcademic Publishers,Amsterdam, 2000. Xii + 227 pp. Illustrations.Bibliography.Notes. Indexes. E57.oo: f36.oo: $54.00. THIsbook is a competent, workmanlikeaccount of the life and writingsof a remarkableSoviet (actually,anti-Soviet)man and writer.Dombrovskii,whose father was evidently of PolishJewish origin, was first arrested at the age of twenty-threeand spent most of the next twenty-threeyears in prisons,labour camps and internal exile (despite being invited, he was never allowed to go abroad, even to Bulgaria).Not surprisingly,most of his output concerns the tension between creative or scholarly individuals (e.g., Derzhavin, Shakespeare , Byron, Griboedov and a museum curatorin Alma-Ata)and the state and society in which they lived. By paying due attention to Dombrovskii's lesser-knownprose and his poetry, Peter Doyle enables us to place the two better-knownnovels, 7The Keeper ofAntiquities and 7heFaculty of Useless Subjects, in context and indirectly suggests why their extremely widely read, broadminded , epilepticand hard-drinkingauthorwas able to eschewself-pity,avoid 510 SEER, 79, 3, 200 1 compromising himself and persist in the struggle to speak, write and behave like a free personality in an unfree country: the Soviet dictatorship was not sui generisin essence, but had been preceded by countless other banal, evil and doomed attempts by spiritual mediocrities to change human nature and the organization of society. Of particular interest is Doyle's examination of Dombrovskii's second novel, 7The Apeis Comingforits Skull,an attack on Nazism (not Hitlerism) which inevitably in places reads like an attack on Stalinism, if not on Communism (Dombrovskii appears not to have criticized Lenin or Leninism by name, despite implying in his last two novels that Stalinism derived from Leninism, and this may in part explain why Solzhenitsyn and Grossman, who clearly trace the Soviet tragedy back to I9I7, have attracted more attention than Dombrovskii). Doyle's monograph, clearly the result of an enormous amount of careful work, is painstakingly annotated and referenced, with some rare illustrations and a detailed and very comprehensive bibliography (although I was surprised not to find Meniaubit'khoteli etisuki,Moscow, i997). He had access to a large amount of unpublished materials, both in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and in the private archives of Dombrovskii's widow and niece. Doyle suggests that Dombrovskii stands 'midway between Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov. He presents a unique combination of the moral certainties, campaigning purpose, and narrative...