524 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 (p. ii9). The book concludeswith ten pages of helpfulnotes which makeclear very economically the novel's most important lexical, historical,literaryand mystical connotations. The translation lacks significant misprints and is attractivelyproduced, in terms of both its typeface and its cover illustration, which isbased on thejacket design of the firstseparatebook edition published in Moscow in i9I0. Department ofRussian R. J. KEYS University ofStAndrews Cavendish, Philip.Miningfor _ewels.Evgenii Zamiatin andtheLiterary Stylization of Rus'.Modern HumanitiesResearchAssociation,Texts andDissertations, 5I. Maney Publishing, Leeds, 2000. XiV + 272 pp. + I 2 pp. of plates. Bibliography.Index. ?34.??:$82.00 (paperback). THE book under review is a version of the author's doctoral dissertation, presented at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, Universityof London in I997. In it Philip Cavendish states his intention of avoiding what he argueshas caused a distortionin the appreciationof Zamiatin as an artist, namely the chronic bias in Zamiatin studies towards the fiction of his postrevolutionaryperiod , particularlythe novel My, and the polemical articlesof the I920S. Making use of the large amount of biographical and archival materialwhich has been published in Russia and elsewhere since the writer's literary 'rehabilitation' in I986, Cavendish follows the development of the earlier, pre-revolutionarypart of Zamiatin's career in order to present 'the neo-Populistethnographer,collector of folklore,poeticizer of provinciallife', and, to paraphrase the writer A. F. Koni from whom the title of the monograph is derived, the 'geologist mining for preciousjewels in the seams of the Russianlanguage' (p. 5). Cavendish occupies an analogous position of discoverer in relation to Zamiatin's own work, and the erudition and breadth of reading which he brings to bear on what are lexically an extremely complex and frequently obscuregroupof textsaremost impressive.Afteran introductionand opening chapter which set the biographical,literary-historicaland literary-theoretical frameworkforhis discussion,Cavendishdevotes three chaptersto the analysis of storiesfocused on peasant folklore('Poludennitsa'['Kuny'], 'Kriazhi',and 'Afrika'),two chapters to works closely linked with the rituals and sacred writings of the Orthodox Church ('Znamenie', and the miracle stories 'O sviatomgrekheZenitsy-devy.Slovo pokhval'noe'and 'O tom, kakistselenbyl otrok Erazm'), and a final chapter, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps in view of itsgeneric heterogeneity,to Blokha and folktheatre. Of central importance to Cavendish's argument is the notion that all of these works are 'stylizationsof Rus", which is to say that they embody their subject matter from a dual perspective, that of the ethnographer to whom these manifestations of the Russian folk and religious spiritwere of intrinsic value, and that of the modernist and, in Zamiatin'scase, agnostic writer whose aim was to subvertthat spirit.In this connection, the author develops an interesting distinction between Zamiatin and some of his Symbolist REVIEWS 525 predecessors. Zamiatin, Cavendish argues, was a Janus-faced writer, one whose oeuvre, very broadlyspeaking,oscillatedbetween two poles of influence, one represented by Andrey Belyi, a self-consciously cosmopolitan and Europeanwriter,and the other by Remizov, who was deeply immersedin the native sourcesof Russianliteratureand culture'(p. 4). While Belyi'sSerebrianyi golub'would need to be given more detailed consideration in relation to the stylizationof Russian folklorethan Cavendish may care to admit, in general his distinctionholds true, and the comparisonwith Remizov, both in termsof direct influence and of implied authorial attitude to religious and folklore material, is a source of consistent illumination in the course of Cavendish's study. Remizov's high seriousnessand lyricism in the handling of materials derived from folk-religiouscultureare contrastedwith Zamiatin'sperspectivism and agnosticism.Whereasin the work of Remizov, folkloreis 'celebrated as the embodiment of the irrational, primitive, and transcendental' (p. 25), Zamiatin'sworkis, by contrast, 'groundedin realism',or rather'neorealism', to use the termpopularizedby the criticIvanov-Razumnikin the neo-Populist journal Zavety before the Revolution and appropriated by Zamiatin in his literary-theoreticallectures and articles after I9I7. In particular,Cavendish argues, 'a pattern is established in Zamiatin's fiction whereby his provincial narrators,whilepoeticizingthe exotic andprimitiveworldof tinycommunities on the peripheries of Russia's metropolitan consciousness, and taking unashamed artistic delight in obscure words and folk customs, give birth to fiction which emphasizes the deep frustrationand oppressionexperienced by the people living in them' (p. 78).As Cavendishgoes on to note, Zamiatinlike Aleksandr Blok, both hated...