REVIEWS 329 this scope and seriousness, it is very surprising not to include a Bibliography, so that it is difficult to quickly ascertain exactly which works by which authors have been studied, and which critics and theorists (and which of their works) are most important. As noted, the chapters are of very different lengths, from eight pages (‘Towards the Question of “man of Nature” and “Man of Culture” in Russian Literature’) to sixty-five pages (‘Rebellious Tradition: Russian Literary Laughter, between Poetry and Pain’). While, of course, no volume will have chapters of exactly equal lengths this extremely wide range creates an odd impression, almost as if the book has been compiled a little randomly from what was to hand. Another structural problem is the lack of any Conclusion, so that the work is not properly rounded off. In more technical areas there is no explanation of what transliteration system is being used, nor when transliteration, translation or Cyrillic is to be used for Russian works: this too creates an impression of a certain randomness, and lack of consistency. While the work is generally written in appropriately sophisticated academic language, there are quite a few infelicities that arise from the fact that the author’s first language is not English, and she would have been well served by a better editor. Three final issues were rather more fundamental problems for this reader at least. Overall, the work is too general, and is not nearly precisely focused enough on the key word of the title (‘irrationalism’). Secondly, and returning to my contextual remarks, this approach strikes me as rather outmoded, and the topic is so imprecise as to be ultimately meaningless. Finally, the author herself apart, this is a very male/masculine book, in terms of the authors and theorists. Tabchnikova’s work would appear to be totally untouched by the discoveries of feminist critics and historians, whose work of the last thirty years seems to have passed her by. School of Humanities Joe Andrew Keele University Porter, Jillian. Economies of Feeling: Russian Literature under Nicholas I. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2017. xi + 198 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.95 (paperback). In her introduction to this new study Jillian Porter summarizes her aim as follows: ‘Charting the intersections between commerce and gift exchange, and tracing shifting cultural conceptions of ambition, generosity, and avarice, I demonstrate that nonmonetary and non-productive exchanges and affects commonly overlooked in economic criticism are inextricably linked to social and economic structures’ (p. 4). Here is a book, we are immediately being told, SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 330 that demands careful and patient reading. But readers will reap rich rewards, for they will quickly become engrossed in a discussion that both illuminates and defamiliarizes a period of the three decades covering the reign of Nicholas I, from 1825 to 1855 — years when Russian literature suddenly came of age and began to speak with an originality and a power that was to astonish the world. In the first chapter, ‘Mad Ambition’, Porter charts the changes in the attitude towards ambition in early nineteenth-century France. First seen by French psychiatrists as the dominant psychological disorder of the age, ambition becomes transformed in works such as Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir and Balzac’s Illusions perdues into something approaching ‘normal’ behaviour — in Porter’s words, ‘French literature ushered this passion out of the madhouse and onto the streets’ (p. 23). Taking Faddei Bulgarin’s ‘Three Pages from the Madhouse’, Gogol´’s ‘The Diary of a Madman’, and Dostoevskii’s The Double as her particular examples, Porter argues that Russian literature, by contrast, was to resist this trend; ambition was to continue to be portrayed as a pathological condition well into the middle of the century. Porter then turns to Gogol´’s Dead Souls, showing how the novel takes issue with the generally accepted view that Russians are an instinctively hospitable people. As Chichikov moves through the cultural wasteland that is provincial Russia, we find ourselves in a social milieu characterized not by sentimentality but by the poetics of disgust. Gogol´, we are asked strikingly to consider, ‘embeds Russian...