REVIEWS 5I3 rape and a 'love scene', resultin a text that emanates chaos interspersedwith moments of tranquillity.Sufferingand quests are emblematic for Vasilenko, so it isfittingthat Shamara setsthe tone for the volume. 'Piggy',the tale of a pig's slaughterfraughtwith domestic subtexts,contains an embedded first-person narrative in which some of the gaps left by the heroine's discourse are filled. Vasilenko closes some of the distance between humans and animals by describing various characters in animal terms and anthropomorphizingVaska('piggy').The narrator'sunwittingtraumatization of her son when she forceshim to watch the pig's slaughterlater causesher to realize the extreme injustice inherent in gender stereotyping and reconsider her relationshipwith her own mother. 'Going After Goat Antelopes' revisitssome of the animal associationsand reverse anthropomorphizationpresent in 'Piggy'. The narratorearly establishes her self-conscious role as prey, watched along with a friend by two military men in a hotel restaurant.She then embarkson an adventure with another mysteriousman she meets in the restaurant,and the ensuing strange coincidences, religious imagery and forays of the imagination combine to produce a text that arises equally from dream-narrativeand folk tale. The narratorconfessesher own unreliability,a favouritedevice for Vasilenko;and the readeriseventuallyinvitedto envisiontworoutesto the samedenouement. 'Little Fool', identified by Goscilo as Vasilenko'sgreatest literaryachievement to date, is the longest work in this volume. Framedby scenes from the early I96os, the bulk of the novel takesplace in the 1930s.Vasilenkopresents a layered narrative:embedded within the text are numerous bits of history and legend, all of which hold a role for the itinerant protagonist Ganna. A mute and a martyr figure, she travels through the narrative providing a promise of redemption in various contexts. Christian notions and Russian folklore contrast starkly with nuclear imagery, highlighting some of the leitmotifsin Vasilenko'sprose. The stylisticunity of the pieces in the volume is a testament to the skillsof the multipletranslatorsinvolved, and the publication of these collected stories will certainlyresultin the increased accessibilityof Vasilenko'swork.Readers will now have a fullerexposureto hercuriouslyhopeful narrativesand hernot wholly fatalisticview of post-Soviet existence. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ELIZABETH SKOMP U_Tniversity CollegeLondon Bartlett, Rosamund (ed.). Shostakovich in Context.Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. XViii+ 224 PP. Illustrations. Notes. f40?.?. ROSAMUND BARTLETT'S interdisciplinary collection of essays attempts to portrayShostakovichand his legacy in a varietyof differentcontexts, moving away fromthe tendency to debate, or, indeed, fightover the extrinsicqualities of his work. It derives from a conference held in I994 and, partially,a book published in Russian two years later. Although more than half of the articles have alreadybeen published, almost all are appearing in English for the first time;the new articlesare by Taruskin,Fanning,Haas, Iakubovand Emerson. 514 SEER, 79, 3, 200 I In a characteristicallyvigorouskeynote article,RichardTaruskinarguesfor caution in interpretingirony, particularlyin California, and for avoiding the extremist stereotypesproposed by such as Volkov and MacDonald, advocating , rather, keeping an open mind, and enjoyment of the ambiguities in Shostakovich'smusic. The next two articles concern Shostakovich'smusical and verbal language: David Fanning, in pleading for musical rather than extra-musical analysis, provides interesting comparisons between Western and Russiancriticism,with particularreferenceto Lady Macbeth ofMtsensk, and some profound observationson Shostakovich'slong-term harmonic thinking in the Tenth Symphony, as well as originalthoughts on the last movement of the Ninth. Svetlana Savenko discusses Shostakovich's literary style (one memorable example of which had already been given by Taruskin as an example of the composer's irony). Savenko's article suffersfrom translation into English,particularlyin the case of an obscurelyexplainedjoke on p. 49. The next seven articlesare in chronologicalorder.LaurelFayexplainshow there came to be so much confusion about the relationship between Shostakovich,the LeningradAssociation of ContemporaryMusic, and Boris Astaf'ev. Liudmila Mikheeva-Sollertinskaiaoffers some interesting excerpts fromthe correspondencebetween the composer and his friendIvan Sollertinskii , highlighting the warmth of their friendshipand keen sense of humour. Inna Barsova discusses the years 1934-37 in the life of Shostakovich; her descriptionis rich in allusionsto contemporaryjournalistic articlesand other documents, showing the fearful tightrope the composer had to walk, culminating in his Fifth Symphony; she gives a detailed analysisof the banal last movement of this work, concluding, 'It is as if the finale somehow eluded the control of self-censorshipand wrote itself' (p. 98...