370 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 republicwas proclaimed. But, like Ukraine, they were tryingto put together a state before they had created the nation. Lackingarms, they could not create a viable army, and their survivaldepended on the White armieskeeping civil war at a distance.With the Red Armytriumphant,theirindependence quickly disappeared.The taskof nation building continued under Soviet rule,but was to be cruelly interrupted under Stalin's purges, when much of the Kazak intelligentsiawas exterminated. Everyhistorianis limited by availablesources,and Sabol acknowledgesthe limits to his. He depends heavily on the publications of the intelligentsia, archivesourcesbeing rathersparse.The unfortunatebut unavoidableresultis that there is little that can be said on how ordinaryKazaks were affected by their efforts. Sabol does, however, stress that the land question was the overriding issue to most Kazaks, and was far more important than political independence, and that the process of developing a national identity he describes was in its early stages. The language is lucid, though there is an assumptionof existingknowledge of the Russian empire in the period. A map would have been useful. This, however, remains a most worthy study that employs the availablesourceseffectivelyand eloquently. Department ofHistoy JOHN SWIFT StMartin'sCollege Steinberg,MarkD. Proletarian Imagination: Sel, Modernity andtheSacred inRussia, I9IO-I925. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, and London, 2002. xii + 335 PP. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95: 1i6.95 (paperback). THEflood of works by proletarian writers in the years before and after the Bolshevikrevolution has only now begun to receive sustained attention from scholarsin the West. Followingon the heels of Evgenii Dobrenko'slarge-scale TheMakingoftheStateWriter (Stanford,CA, 200 I), in which the rise of Soviet literaryinstitutionswas systematicallyanalysed,MarkSteinberghaspresented us with a detailed and subtle social history of early proletarian literature in Russia. The contours of these often tortured attempts at self-expressionby semi-educated workers, along with their many contradictions and inner tensions have seldom been laid out with such care and evident respect. This, along with the meticulousreferencingof sourcematerialwill make Steinberg's book a valuable resourcefor culturalhistoriansand literaryscholarsfor some time to come. While presenting much material of value, Steinberg's book is, however, subject to the same limitations as much social history. Subaltern culture is viewed in isolation from the dominant culture, and the shifting institutional framework that imposed a structure on the 'proletarian imagination' itself. The interactionbetween worker-writersand the dominant cultureprovided a mobile structure that conditioned the development of both cultural trends. Once this focus is lost, process dissolves into ambiguity, the theme that runs throughout Steinberg'sstudy. Symptomatic of Steinberg's approach is an eagerness to draw on much recent cultural theory, but a complete neglect of the tradition of Marxist REVIEWS 37I labour historythat has providedmany subtlereadingsof workingclassculture in other areas. E. P. Thompson's writing on the formation of the English working class, the 'moral economy' and the symbolic structureof subaltern writing, for instance, has much in common with Steinberg's findings about the nascent Russian proletariat, but is completely ignored. Indeed, even contemporary Russian Marxists are given short shrift,generally represented here by the pronouncements of cultural bureaucrats rather than the many more subtle thinkers of the time. The ideological contradictions inherent in much proletarianwriting of the period is set against a rathermechanical and undialectical 'Marxist' meta-narrative and then pronounced to be more complex than Marxist thinkers could comprehend. It is, of course, a simple taskto show the relativevulgarityof culturalbureaucrats'pronouncements in comparisonwith contemporaryculturaltheory,but thiswould be rathermore difficultif these voices were replaced by Walter Benjamin'sforensic analyses of the contradictionsof urbanexperience orAntonio Gramsci'sanalysisof the dynamic relationshipbetween the 'contradictoryconsciousness' of the subaltern masses and the work of 'organic intellectuals' such as the proletarian writers discussed here. These silences in the text speak volumes about the ideological agenda being pursuedhere. In place of an analysisof the ideological and political conflictsof the time in which the proletarian writers engaged, we have a focus on the unstable relations between individual and collective identities, and between religious and secular idea structuresin the work of individual writers. Shifts between optimism and doubts over the possibilityof decisively changing the alienated experiences of the urban masses are not closely integrated into the shifting fortunesof the labour movement before the revolution and then...