MLR, 100.2, 2005 579 Friedrich Ohly's organization of petitions against abuses, Victor Suchy's sacking for 'political unreliability', Rudolf Majut's Schreibverbot, or Jan Aler hiding Jews in his Amsterdam home. Linked to this is the careful attempt to include Jewish scholars even though these may, in their own day, not have received institutional recognition. The point is well made that, though often spurned by the scholarly establishment, Jewish scholars none the less wrote for and were received by their own circles. All this is recorded without value judgements, but there is clearly an intention to provide the materials for future critical discussion. If one were to have a quibble with the conception of this project, it would probably lie with its chronological limitations: why 1800 to 1950? The reason adduced for the terminusa quo is that the earliest university German departments date from the early nineteenth century. However, given that the editors are at pains not to link their selec? tion criteria with institutional hierarchies, it would have been good to trace the roots ofthe subject back to the earliest explorations by Merula, Goldast, and others of their generation. The number of early scholars would not have been so great as to be prohibitive . At the other end, I am unconvinced by the lengthy explanations given forthe decision to close the work at 1950; while there is no doubting the observation that the immediate post-war years marked a turning point and a new beginning, and therefore can be seen as the end of an era, it is not obvious why this makes the new era any less part of the history of Germanistik. One suspects that the real reason lies elsewhere. On the one hand there may have been a consideration of space, at least in the paper form of the Lexikon, because of the explosion of new university departments around the world in the last fiftyyears, while on the other there will have been the politi? cal dynamic of who might be offended by not being included. However, the former problem could have been solved by a mechanism already employed in this project, including less important scholars only on the CD-ROM, while the latter would be alleviated by the simple expedient of not including scholars who are still alive at the time of going to print. The year 2000 would have been a perfectly serviceable cut-off point, and the usefulness of the work would have been enhanced if its chronological scope had been broadened in this way. However, this is a magnificent reference work which will serve the subject well, and ought to be in every serious library. University of Regensburg Graeme Dunphy Popular Theater and Society in Tsarist Russia. By E. Anthony Swift. (Studies on the History of Society and Culture, 44) Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Uni? versity of California Press. 2002. xvi + 346pp. ?32.95. ISBN 0-520-22594-5. By the turn ofthe nineteenth century,the popular theatre movement in Russia faroutstripped in scale and significance its counterparts in any Western European country. Long seen as a means ofenlightening the masses and bridging the cultural gap between the narod (people) and the intelligentsia, and embraced by the 'rational leisure' move? ment as a diversion from less civilized popular pursuits, the idea of 'people's theatres' gained momentum in the decades following the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, and flourished with the end of the Imperial Theatres Monopoly in 1882. It is to this politically and socially charged phenomenon that E. Anthony Swift turns in his stimulating and readable study. Dividing his work into chapters on the urban theatrical land? scape, cultural politics, censorship and repertoire, temperance organizations, workers' theatres, and audience reception, Swift charts the emergence ofpeople's theatres while assessing their significance politically and culturally, and as an indicator of the pro? found social change that occurred in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Russia. 580 Reviews It is perhaps the sheer scale of his subject matter that engenders some of the limitations of Swift's work. Although he begins his study with a brief discussion of the skomorokhi and popular theatrical culture prior to the Great Reforms...