J. Douglas Clayton and Yana Meerzon, eds. Adapting Chekhov: Text and Its Mutations. Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. New York and London: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013. xviii, 316 pp. $135.00, cloth.In dialogue with Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation and categories outlined by Gerard Genette, Adapting Chekhov explores potential of adaptation a permanent feature of globalized culture, as Caryl Emerson recognizes in her foreword, by engaging categories and methodologies of mutation in diverse, particularly post[ist], contexts and performances (p. xv). Examining concretizations and transformations-intramedial and intermedial transpositions-of Chekhov text across cultures, recent histories, and media, this collection of fifteen essays attests to challenge of collectively defining much abused adjective as well as to adaptability and mutability of Anton Chekhov's dramatic vision. With thorough inquiry as to nature of relationship between Chekhov and modem dramas and performances informed and shaped by his texts, this selection of scholars and directors considers socio-political contexts of text and intertext, hypertext and hypotext, thereby enriching the enigma of Chekhov's poetics (P-7).The first part of collection centres on artistry and historical context of Chekhov's plays and their mutations in modem post-narrative or post-dramatic modes (p. 8). J. Douglas Clayton's Diagnosis and Balagan draws on Vsevolod Meierkhol'd's The Balagan to identify a Chekhovian tradition of linguistic satire and generic innovations-a balagannost'-celebrated in Bedbug by Vladimir Maiakovskii and in Elizaveta Bam by Daniil Kharms (pp. 28-29). Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu (Rewriting Chekhov in Russia Today) discovers a debased, deconstructed, and recycled Chekhov in several post-Soviet works, including those of Nikolai Koliada, Vladimir Sorokin, and Boris Akunin. Against backdrop of Czech concretization of Chekhov in 1960s in dramatic texts by such playwrights as Milan Kundera and Josef Topol as well as in stagings of Chekhov by director Otomar Krejca, Veronika Ambros (Talking and Walking Past Each Other) highlights Chekhov's appearance amidst Vaclav Havel's pastische of fragments from famous texts in Leaving. remaining two articles address Chekhov's presence in anglophone drama with Maria Ignatieva (The Flight of Dead Bird) concluding that in Notebook ofTrigorin Tennessee Williams desymbolizes Chekhov's seagull and uses sub-sex to motivate his characters' behaviour, and with Charles Lamb in Howard Barker's {Uncle) analyzing Barker's conception of an angry and ironic Vanya that puncture[sj Chekhovian complacency in a polemic with dramatist's extensive veneration in British stage tradition (pp. 65, 105).The second part of volume focuses on Chekhov's participation in cultural transfer in post-communist and post-colonial contexts. situatedness of his dramatic portrayals in a liminal period of Russian history (the fm-de-siecle transition between old world and new) motivates their appropriation in post[ist] contexts, but post-colonial reception of Chekhov's plays reflects a tension between their expressed anticolonial sentiments and their association with language of Empire owing to their place in a Western canon imposed on colonial subjects. Following a brief discussion outlining fusion of communist and Western influences on post-communist Romanian productions of Chekhov, Diana Manole (Transtextual Crossbreeds in Post-Communist Context) identifies in her anthropological analysis of Romanian hypertext Seagull from Cherry Orchard by Horia Gârbea a postmodern hybrid of Vanya and Lopakhin with Hamletian undertones (p. 109). Magda Romanska (Chekhov in Age of Globalization) considers how anti-Soviet sensitivities and Russophobia affect Polish reception of Janusz Gowacki's Fourth Sister, which grapples with dislocation and fear of transiency arising from liminal quality of post-communist existence in a world fractured by globalization without communist-era myth of American dreamscape, or the Promised Land (p. …