620 Reviews multiple strands of domestic and world politics and literary and cultural associ ations' (p. 25), and is imagined as representing such categories as 'youth, exile, political disillusionment, anti-autocratic feelings, Decembrism, poetic debut and poetic success, Russia's Imperial power, "foreignness" and potential escape from the confines of the empire' (pp. 144-45). University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Literary Scholarship inLate Imperial Russia: Rituals ofAcademic Institutionalization. By Andy Byford. London: Legenda. 2007. 188 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-0 300108-89-7. There is a certain synchronicity about the publication ofAndy Byford's excellent investigation of the history, and vicissitudes, of the (literary) humanities in pre Revolutionary, imperial Russia inour own era of governmental 'tsars',Departments ofBusiness, Innovation, and Skills, and, dare itbe said,piatiletki. Compulsory read ing though this book should be for all involved in university management today, its most significant contribution is of course to thefield ofRussian studies, firstand foremost because Byford's persuasive argumentation and meticulous documenta tion of a neglected field should stimulate vital self-criticism about the heuristic paradigms that have shaped our subject area. In this respect Byford's monograph makes two extremely important systemic contributions. First, it ispart of a process of reassessment of the Russian nineteenth century, whereby cultural historians attempt to step out of the teleological shadow cast by the gargantuan events of the early twentieth century, and indeed, to redress themethodological blindspots that grew from the Soviet era; second, Byford also joins those few (in the UK, largely Bakhtin Circle-oriented Russianists) who strive to contextualize the in sights of early twentieth-century Russian literary theorists. 'Contextualization', as such scholars (and Byford) show us, is not a feeble flap of the hand to clear the haze surrounding a lapidary object of study, but is a methodological imperative by which we might understand the ineluctable, endlessly intricate connectedness of any instance of human endeavour: as such it requires rigour, investigative grit, an ability to synthesize synchronic and diachronic complexity, and even a nose forwhat ismissing from prevailing accounts. It is by such means that Byford for mulates his arguments that the Soviet-era science of literature',which for so long has been explained as the Formalist and Marxist rejection (and by extension, the Bakhtinian refinement and/or refutation) of unreconstructed historical positivism, in fact owed everything to the legacy of science-building and the cult of academic learning (nauka) fostered by literary scholars of tsarist times in their concerted efforts to institutionalize literary studies as a legitimate form of academic practice' (p. 5). Byford's account of this legacy embraces not just the important, empiricist side of 'contextualization'?providing invaluable historical detail of events in the corridors of academia?but also the symbolic significance of rituals, the rhetoric of the texts of academia (the biographies, the inaugural lectures, the teaching manuals, their linkages of 'literary science' with the new discourses of nation and MLR, 105.2, 2010 621 nationhood, and the people), to show how they constructed their own doxa, their own 'belief in the stakes and values of the field [...], in its "natural" order and its "commonsensical" divisions and oppositions' (p. 7). Byford structures his argument in four chapters. The firstexamines the con nections between autocratic nation-building in the nineteenth century and the creation of a network of universities across the territories of the Russian Empire. He gives an interesting account of the ebbs and flows in autonomy and degree of state intervention, from the relatively liberal early days ofAlexander I, to the harnessing of universities toUvarov's Ministry ofEducation and doctrine of official nationalism in 1834 and the 1848 clampdown; thiswas followed byAlexander II's University Charter of 1863, which saw the liberation of the universities from the Ministry, the creation of new departments, and an embrace of Western ideas; in its turn thiswas followed by a second clampdown afterAlexander II's assassination? afterwhich, from themid-1880s through the 1890s theMinistry of Education assumed control of allmatters of staffing,curriculum, and assessment and cut costs by enlisting a large, underpaid, disenfranchised body of contract-based privaty dotsenty to undertake lower-level service classes, the result ofwhich was a Assuring of the academic body and a...