I12 SEER, 8o, I, 2002 the South Slav region and a significantcontribution to gender studies more generally. Department ofSlavonic Studies DAVID A. NORRIS University ofNAottingham Morris, Marcia A. TheLiterature ofRogueyin SeventeenthandEighteenth -Centuy Russia.Studies in Russian Literatureand Theory. NorthwesternUniversity Press, Evanston, IL, 2000. x + I73 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $79-95. F. W. CHANDLER'S classicRomances ofRoguey(1899) was one of the few general survey works available when as an undergraduate I first began to study Spanish literatureof the Golden Age, and in particularthe picaresque novel and the work of Cervantes. It is a book which Marcia Morris lists in her bibliographyand cites on one occasion in her text (p. I 23) and which echoes in the title she has carefullychosen for her own study. 'Romance', however, undoubtedlygives confusingsignalsand she has opted for 'literature'which in turnpresentsits own problems.Hers is not a studyof the picaresquenovel, or 'picaresques', as she on occasion calls it, such as undertaken by Ronald LeBlanc (The Russianization of Gil Blas, Columbus, OH, I986) and Jurij Striedter (DerSchelmenroman inRussland, Berlin, I96I), but is a wider-ranging investigationinto 'the literatureof roguery',essentially'a rich native tradition of rogue tales' from the seventeenth century and 'translated Western and homegrown varieties of picaresque' from the second half of the eighteenth century(p. 2). Rather than accepting a clean breakbetween the productsof the centuries, suchasespousedby Striedter,MorrisfollowsLeBlancinlookingforcontinuity and reverberationsof 'many of the plots and techniques firstbroached in the earlier tales'. This leads her to posit a threefold concern with a) new interpretations of seventeenth-century works, b) revisiting neglected eighteenth -century examples, and c) exploring the 'specificallyRussian dynamics of earlyrogueliterature'.At the sametime, shewishesto highlighthermentors in the field of literarytheory, particularlythose who inspiredher to transcend what she sees as the restrictiveboundaries of 'genre to the liberated space of "modal coloring" or the qualitythat a storytellerimpartsto the attributesof a fictional reality' (p. 4), and namely, Robert Scholes with his 'Towards a Poeticsof Fiction:An ApproachthroughGenre' (i 969) and, more specifically, Ulrich Wicks's 'The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach' (I974). In short, she argues, 'the great advantage of modal analysis over a generic one lies in the fact that modes do not impose a particularform on a work of fiction. Modal coloring is pregeneric, which is to say that it is a broaderor more basic categorythan genre;it alsotranscendshistory,which is to saythat workscan be writtenin a particularmode at any time or place'. Thus liberated,Morrisincludes a wide varietyof textswhich varyfrom the expected to the surprising.Fromthe seventeenth century,alongside 'Povest'o FroleSkobeeve',sheselectsthefarlesspredictable'Povest'o SavveGrudtsyne', 'Povest' o Ershe Ershoviche', 'Shemiakin sud' and 'Povest' o krest'anskom REVIEWS 113 syne'. The eighteenth-century texts in contrast could be more or less anticipated: Chulkov's Peresmeshnik and Prigozhaia povarikha iii pokhozhdenie razvratnoi zhenshchiny; various versions of Van'ka Kain;the Russian/Polish Till Eulenspiegel, Sovest-dral; and Ivan Novikov's Pozhodenie Ivana gostinogo synai drugie povestii skazki.The tail-piece from the firstyears of the nineteenth century is Karamzin'sMoaaispoved', whose Count N. N. would seem to make a dubious picaro. Morrisgroupsand analysesher chosen worksin fourchaptersentitled 'The Repentant Rogue', 'The Rogue Rewarded', 'The Unresolved Rogue Career' and 'The Rogue Punished',before reachingher conclusions in 'The Contexts of Roguery'. The discussion of the various tales and novels is frequently enlightening and sensitive, but the assertionthat Russia had 'a dynamic and vibrantlegacy of literaryroguery'(p. i i 8) is hardlyconvincing. Morris is undoubtedly right in rescuing the last three of her seventeenthcentury worksnamed above from V. Adrianova-Peretts'sinfluentialdescription of themas 'democraticsatires'(I 937), buttheirplace in thenew taxonomy of roguery is questionable. The inclusion of 'Ersh Ershovich' in particular would seem to open a whole world of minor forms,anecdotes, zharty, jokes and fables, in prose and in verse, in which 'roguery', however widely or narrowly it is understood, plays a significant role. (Incidentally, the life of Aesop, prefacing the fables, ratherthan the fables themselves, was suggested by the Polish scholar Eliza Malek in 1992 as contributing to the Russian plutovskoi roman.) While Morris'sexamplesfromthe seventeenthcenturyseem to some extent decontextualized from a rich world of popular humour, so some of the eighteenth-century tales seem to lose much by being removed...