Queen Of Spades Research Articles

Composing for the Red screen: Prokofiev and Soviet film

Acknowledgements Editorial Matters Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. New Media, New Means: Lieutenant Kizhe, 1932-34 Chapter 2. The Queen of Spades, The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee, and Repatriation Chapter 3. The Year 1938: Halcyon Days in Hollywood and an Unanticipated Collaboration Chapter 4. Alexander Nevsky and the Stalinist Museum Chapter 5. The Wartime Films, 1940-43 Chapter 6. Ivan the Terrible and the Russian National Tradition Epilogue Appendix Works cited Index

“The Captain’s Daughter” and “A History of Pugachov. ” by Alexander Pushkin, and: “The Queen of Spades” and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin, and: Ruslan and Lyudmila by Alexander Pushkin, and: Love Poems by Alexander Pushkin (review)

“The Captain’s Daughter” and “A History of Pugachov. ” by Alexander Pushkin, and: “The Queen of Spades” and Other Stories by Alexander Pushkin, and: Ruslan and Lyudmila by Alexander Pushkin, and: Love Poems by Alexander Pushkin (review)

Lolita as Petersburg Text

Is the ending of Lolita real or imagined? Does Humbert Humbert visit Dolly Schiller and murder Quilty? Or doesn’t he? While most scholars accept the fictional reality of the last three days’ events, a growing number of scholars cite the novel’s chronology to challenge that reading. Since Humbert declares that he has been writing for 56 days, they count back from his reported death and determine that he began writing the day he claims to receive Dolly’s letter. The novel’s chronology thus undermines a realist reading but does not undo it altogether. This article explores the overlooked possibility that Lolita ’s ending is deliberately ambiguous. Returning to Nabokov’s roots in the Russian literary tradition, I argue that Lolita , Nabokov’s most American novel, is also a Petersburg text. A native of St. Petersburg, Nabokov adopts the narrative ambiguity that characterizes Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades,” Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Dostoevsky’s The Double . These works not only engage themes of duality, madness, and dreams common to other Petersburg texts, they also raise ontological questions and contain evidence on both sides that cannot be dismissed. Placing Lolita into this tradition thus provides a both/and rather than an either/or solution to the revisionist debate.

Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage by Inna Naroditskaya (review)

REVIEWS 887 but Absurdopediia russkoi zhizni Vladimira Sorokina is the most exhaustive and compelling exploration of Sorokin’s work in any language, and looks set to be so for some time yet. Department of Politics, Languages and David Gillespie International Studies, University of Bath Naroditskaya, Inna. Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2012. xvi + 401 pp. Illustrations. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £45.00. At the centre of Inna Naroditskaya’s ingenious and engaging new book is the idea that ‘[a]s real tsarinas disappeared from Russia’s political stage, a number of magical tsarinas materialized in Russian fairy-tale operas’ (p. xii). In order to explore this insight in greater detail, Naroditskaya first examines the role of Russia’s four eighteenth-century tsarinas as patrons of opera, drawing on Richard Wortman’s work on imperial ceremony and spectacle to argue that opera was an ideal vehicle through which they could promote — and almost literally stage — the potency of their own rule. In particular, Naroditskaya argues for the decisive role played by Catherine the Great in establishing Russia’s tradition of historical and fairytale operas. She then turns her attention to the nineteenth century, noting that with the establishment of a nationalist musical historiography, this feminine lineage was violently repressed. Where Russian tsarinas used opera to represent themselves in artistic form, they now became the object of a masculine historiography that tended to dismiss them as artistically inferior and derivative of foreign models. As Glinka was crowned the father of Russian music, his eighteenth-century female antecedents were effaced in a process that Naroditskaya terms ‘the transformation of historical empressesintosupernaturaloperatic(anti)heroines’(p.5).Devotingchaptersto individual studies of operas by Glinka (Ruslan and Liudmila), Dargomyzhskii (Rusalka), Rimskii-Korsakov (Mlada and Sadko) and Chaikovskii (Queen of Spades), she reveals how ‘Russian male protagonists and their creators were prone to mid-to-late-nineteenth-century psychosis, which, in part, reflected on the past, fictional and historical. […] The idea that their Russia had been shaped not only by Peter but more recently and more obviously by foreign female(s), haunted these men’ (p. 238). This obsession is perhaps clearest in Naroditskaya’s final example, Chaikovskii’s version of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades. Where scholars like Simon Morrison have examined the opera’s syncretism as a premonition of symbolist aesthetics, Naroditskaya prefers to see its temporal ambiguities as indicative of an almost oedipal struggle between a strong eighteenth-century precursor (Catherine the Great) and a nineteenth-century tradition desperate to overcome such an overwhelming SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 888 authority. Yet this struggle was fated to be metonymic, not just because artistic influence is almost always tangential, but also because the nineteenth-century ban on the representation of imperial subjects on the Russian stage meant that the presence of eighteenth-century tsarinas was often indicated by means of absence, illusion or apparition. Written with great verve and assurance, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage is nonetheless a work whose seemingly simple guiding thesis accommodates a range of subtle and sensitive readings. Some might cavil at Naroditskaya’s apparent willingness to blur the boundaries between creative artists, fictional characters and broad characterizations of Russian culture, and her account of how a nineteenth-century tradition of masculine nationalism sought to eradicate its feminine roots in the eighteenth century rests on the fact that there were simply no female claimants to the throne in Russia after Catherine the Great. It would be an interesting counterfactual exercise to wonder how the book’s thesis might have looked had there been a nineteenth-century Russian tsarina to rival her, and Naroditskaya chooses not to make any comparisons with the representation of the male ruler in Russian opera (consider, for example, Musorgskii’s handling of the figure of the tsar in both Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina). At times, her account reads like a careful but persistent psychoanalytic analysis of its subject matter (Naroditskaya’s use of the word ‘psychosis’ in the passage cited above is telling). If Freudian theories will potentially strike some as being out of place in a piece of historical musicology (however...

Cartography of Curves: Black Women and Eros in Prose and Pictures: A Dialogue between Rachel Eliza Griffiths (photographer) and Alice Randall (novelist), with an Introduction, “Black Magic Women,” by Houston A. Baker

Cartography of Curves: Black Women and Eros in Prose and Pictures:A Dialogue between Rachel Eliza Griffiths (photographer) and Alice Randall (novelist), with an Introduction, “Black Magic Women,” by Houston A. Baker Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Alice Randall, and Houston A. Baker Editor’s Note: Notes from a conversation between Rachel Eliza Griffths and Alice Randall held March 22, 2012, at the Robert Penn Warren Center at Vanderbilt University over lunch with students and faculty attending. The dialogue was part of the “Sex in the 21st Century Symposium” sponsored by the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies. The conversation was a back and forth between Rachel Eliza and Alice, with readings providing counterpoint to photographs and photographs providing counterpoint to readings. Houston A. Baker feted Griffiths and Randall in his introductory remarks, entitled, “Black Magic Women.” Houston A. Baker: We are blessed this afternoon by Black Magic Women. Such magic is not fake fire or disappearing doves. Black Magic Women are pure historical and artistic imagination. They are luminous intellect and compassion. They harmonize with ancestral spirits and transmute middle passages. They transform Diaspora unknowing into Black Magical intuition, innovation, and Gnosis—a special alchemy of knowledge. They renew the world. Listen to the song in one measure: “I need you so bad black magic woman, I can’t leave you alone!” (Santana). Alice Randall righteously entered the “Silver Circle of ASCAP” (The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). Who would have dreamed a black woman from DE-TROIT would become the first black woman [End Page 87] to write a number one country hit song in Nashville, and go on to produce music videos for some of country music’s most outstanding performers? Who could possibly do that but a black magic woman? Alice Randall is a Harvard graduate and novelist who successfully satirized the soul butter and flapdoodle of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Her runaway narrative success, The Wind Done Gone, is a black jubilation song. It boldly assumed premiere place on the New York Times Best-Seller List. There followed, for Randall, awards and nominations for such brilliant and audacious novels as Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. (Who dares create, in Tupac Shakur ambiance, a character named “Pushkin X”?) Next came Rebel Yell, a complex creation that carries readers into a kaleidoscope of psychological, ethnographic, and black decoding of the dilemma of post–civil rights generations. We are called out of our skin by Black Magic Women. And when they are in combination—as Alice Randall and Rachel Eliza Griffiths are today—we need to fasten our seatbelts with shoulder straps tightly. It is the only way to prevent our souls from convulsing in un-abandoned JOY. Hear the song: “I got a black magic woman/Got me so blind I can’t see” (Hendrix). For, we also have with us Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Rachel is an artist who speaks in her poetry of the bandaged woman, pulled from her bed and deconstructed without anesthesia. Rachel Eliza Griffiths magically suffuses her creative audition and inventiveness into worlds of Jean Toomer, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. She strides magnificently into the red zone between civilization and its discontents, Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, black rage and ebony masterpieces with grace. She casts Shiva shadows on the arts. Like Alice Randall, Rachel Griffiths is replete with music, photographic miracles, narrative and cinematic intuitions. There are standard, “Googleable” biographies of the Black Magic Women with whom we are blessed today. But beware. The standard biographies will lead you to believe they can be captured by ordinary words. You will hear no ordinary words here today. Only magic. Alice Randall: Quiet as it is kept, at least in certain circles, there is a “pro-sex” contingent in black feminist scholarship—in fact there are many. I perceive Rachel Eliza Griffiths to be a pro-sex feminist scholar and my work as a novelist places me squarely within one of the pro-sex contingents within black feminist scholarship. Sex is both a subject and a strategy in my work. One of the reasons I wrote a critique of the novel Gone with the Wind as another...

New Series of Pushkin Editions in English

New Series of Pushkin Editions in English Roger Clarke Alma Classics of Richmond, United Kingdom, is bringing out a new series of Pushkin texts in English. Their intention is, during the next few years, to publish in paperback volumes, purchasable individually, the whole Pushkin corpus in English translation, with appropriate commentaries and background material. This series will supersede the fifteen-volume set of Pushkin's works in English published by Milner and Company in England between 1999 and 2003. The Milner edition is out of print, but Alma Classics (formerly One-world Classics) now own the rights to that material and will draw on it, with corrections, revisions, and additions, in developing the new series. Five volumes have already appeared— Ruslan and Lyudmila (2009: dual-language text, reprinted in 2012) Boris Godunov and the Little Tragedies (2010) Eugene Onegin (2011: dual-language text) The Queen of Spades and Shorter Prose Fiction (including unfinished works) (2011) The Captain's Daughter and A History of Pugachov (2012) The translations and extensive commentaries in the first three volumes are by Roger Clarke, the Series Editor for the project. The last two volumes are made up primarily of Professor Paul Debreczeny's translations, first published by Stanford University Press in 1983 and reissued (with permission) by Milner; but the texts have been re-edited and re-presented and are supplemented with some new translations and commentary. Alma Classics is proposing in 2013 to bring out a volume of some of the lyrics, followed by a new translation of The Tales of Belkin. Volumes already issued can be ordered from the publisher Alma Classics on www.almaclassics.com, or through high street and electronic booksellers. [End Page 161] Copyright © 2012 by its author

A Ukrainian Tune in Medieval France: Perceptions of Nationalism and Local Color in Russian Opera

Abstract This article is based on the key-note lecture given at the conference “Non-Nationalist” Russian Operas, Leeds, U.K., on 17 November 2010. It engages with the conference9s distinction between the “nationalist” and “non-nationalist” and proposes six potential situations for when an opera might be described as “Russian”: by composer9s intention, by reception, by interpretation, by association, by blood or culture, and by emanating from the nationalist school. Given that these six categories of Russianness (some of them mystificatory) form a network of conflicting claims upon any opera, there is no straightforward method for assigning operas to Russian or non-Russian categories. Therefore an alternative approach is proposed: to revive the older concept of “local color,” which figured prominently in nineteenth-century Russian discourse on opera, and to use this as a lens through which almost any nineteenth-century Russian opera can instructively be viewed. After examining how the concept was understood by leading Russian critics, Serov and Cui, the author offers a selection of her own examples to elucidate the use of “Russian” local color. It is emphasized that there are certain limits beyond which this color cannot be applied: characters of noble birth, even when Russian, are rarely portrayed in Russian colors; scenes that take place outside Russia usually have their own, appropriate color, e.g., “Polish” or “Oriental”; most importantly, themes that are considered universal, such as love or death, are usually exempt from Russian coloring. Examples from the late operas of Rimsky-Korsakov demonstrate his conscious and sometimes obsessive efforts in creating appropriate colors, Russian and otherwise. This approach allows us to set aside preconceived notions of which composers were truly national, especially when we generalize that local color denotes any distinguishing device designed to evoke a specific time and place, as well as the social identity of a character. Thus Tchaikovsky9s operas, often criticized for their lack of “Russianness,” display a subtle understanding of appropriate coloring: Eugene Onegin , for example, uses an idiom based on the parlor song of the Russian gentry, while The Queen of Spades takes up eighteenth-century idioms—in both cases lending the drama an appropriate color. The article concludes that local color, a much-used device in nineteenth-century opera across Europe, was an almost obligatory requirement for Russian opera composers who adopted an aesthetic of the characteristic, along the lines proposed by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell . The concept proves to be a valuable critical tool that allows us to deal with nineteenth-century Russian opera without becoming ensnared in essentializing distinctions between “nationalist” and “non-nationalist.” At the same time, it allows us to put Russian color in perspective, as one color among many cultivated by opera composers.

Restoring Pushkin: Ideology and Aesthetics in Prokofiev's Queen of Spades

Immediately following his repatriation in 1936, Prokofiev composed a film score for a screen adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades. Although the film was never finished, Prokofiev's completed score reveals an idiosyncratic approach to film music, one that is strikingly different than that found in his better known scores such as Alexander Nevsky. Reconstruction of the production and its context demonstrates how Prokofiev's aesthetic goals of a "new simplicity," characterized by lyricism, spare textures, and avoidance of dissonance, would successfully intersect with the ideological goals of a Jubilee celebration planned by the Soviet government for the centenary of Pushkin's death.

Catherine's Retinue: Old Age, Fashion, and Historicism in the Nineteenth Century

Beside her political and cultural legacy, Catherine II bequeathed to the nineteenth century a certain striking image of the body and spirit of the eighteenth: an aging aristocratic lady, inflexible in her behavioral routines and visibly unaware of historical change. This image was codified by Aleksandr Pushkin in The Queen of Spades and, much later, satirized by Ivan Turgenev in several of his novels. Highlighting the recurrence of these copies of Catherine the Great in nineteenth-century Russian prose, Luba Golburt interprets the narrative and historical implications of fashion and aging in this period that was fascinated with historical knowledge and imagination. The persistence of the past embodied by these figures posed a challenge to the otherwise widely embraced Hegelian notions of progress, underscoring the repetitive and ritualistic rhythms of historical experience. These figures also extended the realist narrative's historical scope and made possible a range of polyphonous temporal structures.

“A Lonely Cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island” and Pushkin’s Tales about st. Petersburg

Pushkin was not only a founder of the Petersburg text tradition; he was the first Russian author who wrote in the style of fantastic realism. Its main feature is a combination of a fantastic plot with realistic details, such as “The Queen of Spades,” “The Broze Rider,” and “A Small Cottage in Kolomna.” The article focuses on a grotesque oral story about the lonely cottage on the Vasilyevsky Island, told by Pushkin and written down and then published by his acquaintance Titov. Based on a hint contained in its introduction, it is argued that the story about a lonely cottage was composed by Pushkin as a sort of a secret funerary composition, which explains the gloomy atmosphere of the narrative. The article also draws parallels between this story and other works by Pushkin in the style of fantastic realism. As a founder of the Petersburg text tradition, it is shown how Pushkin’s picture of the world was moving from a deterministic vision to a probabilistic one.

The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century: In Pursuit of Hesitation by Claire Whitehead (review)

REVIEWS 707 perhaps, she displays an infectious enthusiasm for her subject. The biblio graphy is comprehensive and there are extensive quotations from secondary sources. Quotations fromRussian critics are given firstinEnglish translation and then in the original. The author is a little over-conscientious in this respect and thebook isoccasionally rather too reminiscent of a doctoral thesis. In one place, for instance, (p. 42) Simon Dixon's perfectiy sound, but unexcep tional, observations about the importance of the Decembrist Revolt are perhaps given undue weight, whilst in at least one other place (p. 31) the reader isat three removes (in this case Smith ? Schweikart ? Fish) from the body ofwork under discussion. The proof-reading of thisvolume could have been better. There are at least thirty-seven typographical errors, and a number of names are wrongly spelled: Adolphe, Bayley, Beranger (who does not appear in the index under any spelling), Breton, Boccaccio, Diderot, Fennell, Ginzburg, Holderlin, Loseff, Propertius and Schopenhauer. The name of Pushkin's nemesis is spelled Benckendorff and Benkendorff on the same page (p. 209) and is given two apparently unrelated entries in the index. Petr Viazemskii suffers much the same fate.A couple of dates ? those ofMaiakovskii's death and theBattle of Poltava ? are one year out (pp. 224, 318). However, in the final analysis, these are minor irritants and Rodopi are to be congratulated on continuing, through this excellent series, to flythe flag forRussian literature.To use one of the author's favourite adjectives, this is an 'insightful'book, written, to use twomore Smith favourites, both 'convincingly' and 'compellingly'. Maidenhead Michael Pursglove Whitehead, Claire. The Fantastic inFrance and Russia in the NineteenthCentury: In Pursuit of Hesitation. Studies in Comparative Literature, io. Legenda, Oxford, 2006. x + 170pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?45.00: $69.00. This recent volume from the Legenda imprintmaintains the high standards of production and academic excellence in the field of comparative literature that readers have come to expect from the marque. A study in the genre of the fantastic, cleaving to the terrain mapped out in Tzvetan Todorov's classic investigation of the subject, Introduction a la litterature fantastique (Paris, 1970),The Fantastic in France and Russia in the Nineteenth Century sets out to test and confirm the earlier author's definition of the genre while supplementing his theoretical framework with furtherparameters. The approach taken is to subject eight representative fictional texts of the nineteenth century, four French and four Russian, to close stylistic and linguistic scrutiny. Each chapter consists of a pairing of twoworks chosen for theirmarked similarities in construction. In this respect, Claire Whitehead's treatment is reminiscent of the one employed with such distinction by L. Michael O'Toole in Structure, Styleand Interpretation in theRussian Short Story (New Haven, CT and London, 1982), a work not referenced in the extensive six-and-a-half page bibliography. Yet, whereas O'Toole confined himself to the Russian short story, Whitehead examines longer works of fiction in the course of her analysis and the selection is 708 SEER, 86, 4, OCTOBER 2008 comparative. The methodology, however, likeO'Toole's, remains resolutely Neo-Formalist: art as technique, ninety years after Shklovskii formulated his axiom. Such an approach is both a strengthand a limitation. It is a strength in that in enables Whitehead to focus her attention exclu sively on those narrative strategies and literarydevices available to an author who draws upon the full range of the expressive capacity of either the French or the Russian language to invest the textwith the sense of hesitation so crucial to the establishment of the fantastic.Whitehead contends pointedly in the Introduction that 'Todorov's investigation of the triggersfor hesitation in the fantastic is incomplete because he shows greater interest in the events than in the devices used to present them' (p. 4). The subsequent tracking down of narrative and syntactical devices occupies four chapters. Chapter one analyses the language of Pushkin's Queen ofSpades (1834) and Gautier's Spirite (1865) in order to establish how the effectsof believability and hesitation are embedded in the respective Russian and French texts.Both theseworks are examples of third-person narrative or, asWhitehead (followingGenette) prefers to call it, a heterodiegetic narrative voice. Chapter two...

The Capacious Greatcoat

The Capacious Greatcoat Ed Minus (bio) Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida edited by Robert Chandler (Penguin Classics, 2006. 656 pages. $17 pb) I did not know the name Robert Chandler until New York Review Books published, early in 2006, his translation of the monumental World War ii novel Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Since I do not know Russian, I cannot speak with any authority about the fidelity of that translation. I can only say that I was seldom unduly conscious that I was reading a translation; and, when I forced myself to become conscious on that level, Chandler's English prose seemed to me closer to the best translations of Chekhov than to those of any other major Russian writer I've read (if you can imagine Chekhov devoting chapter after chapter to accounts of close combat). Of the forty-one selections in Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Mr. Chandler translated about half and cotranslated another eight. In terms of pages, twenty to thirty stories must have been a lark compared to [End Page vi] the nearly nine hundred pages of Life and Fate; but on another level the challenge might well have been daunting: keeping each of an alphabet of writers from reading less like himself or herself than like Robert Chandler. Collections of stories rarely profit from being read straight through, a caveat that certainly applies here, for many of these stories sound—stylistically—more alike than different. The exceptions are several stories that employ specific and distinctive literary devices. In Turgenev's "The Knocking" the peasant Filofey speaks with an accent close to cockney; in Leskov's "The Steel Flea" deliberate and amusing malapropisms abound; and the first-person narrator of Babel's "My First Goose" uses much harsher language than in any other version I've read of that much-translated masterpiece. The similarities are not just stylistic. Nearly all of the stories feel Russian, though it is not always easy to say just where the Russianness resides. But anyone who has read much of the incomparable literature of that unfathomable country will recognize the open and intense emotionalism, the unrelieved menace of brutal and often irrational authority, and the tendency to indulge in samovar philosophy fed by what Maksim Gorky called the "Russian bent for sadness." It is hardly surprising that the stories which seem least Russian are those set elsewhere: "The Gentleman from San Francisco" and "In Paris," both by Ivan Bunin (the former also boasts the most impressive committee of translators: S. S. Koteliansky, D. H. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf—and the result, against odds, is close to perfection). It is also the case that these resemblances in form and content are genealogical. The aphorism "We have all come out of Gogol's greatcoat" has been attributed to half a dozen Russian masters of the short story and might well have been voiced by writers all over the globe. Not by Pushkin, however, whose story "The Queen of Spades" was published almost a decade before "The Greatcoat." Chandler's selections are arranged chronologically, and so he begins, inevitably, with Pushkin and "The Queen of Spades," which he calls "the greatest of all Russian short stories." He does not, unfortunately, defend that accolade, and I am not quite sure that it is easily defensible, though I should add that for me all of Pushkin's prose suffers by comparison with that charlotte russe of a poem "Yevgeny Onegin." Nevertheless I can think offhand of a dozen Russian stories for whose superiority I would argue: half a dozen by Chekhov, two by Gogol, several by Babel, and, preeminently, Tolstoy's "The Three Hermits." Chandler includes one Chekhov story, "In the Cart"; Gogol's "Greatcoat"; three by Babel; and one by Tolstoy, "God Sees the Truth, but Waits"; also one apiece by Lermontov, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. The work of all these writers is readily available in English, and Chandler is to be commended for choosing in several instances a lesser-known but first-rate story over the more familiar anthology standard. Furthermore most serious readers will be especially grateful to Chandler for bringing to their attention a group of modern...

Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol by Ilya Kutik (review)

136 SEER, 86, I, 2008 animate or inanimate, abstract or concrete. Dr Ferm accepts that these factors are involved, but she goes on to show that the chief factor driving changes in verbal government is not the nature of the complements but changes in the semantics of the verbs which govern them. Thus, when Ha?eflTbCfl ceased to govern a genitive and took instead the preposition Ha plus an accusative, it was because HaAeflTbCfl had ceased to be associated with such verbs of expectation as 03KH.zja.Tband had become linked instead with verbs such as pacCHHTbiBaTb (pp. 23, 77-83), or again when npeAynpe^HTb switched from taking a complement in the dative to being followed by a direct object in the accusative, itwas because npeflynpcaHTb was no longer classed with such verbs as npenHTCTBOBaTb but with verbs such as npeflOTBpaTHTb (pp. 23, 223-25). In her Grammatika sovremennogo russkogoliteraturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1970), N. Iu. Shvedova declined to 'examine the frequency, contextual constraints and stylistic characteristics of the varying forms [of verbal government]' (p. 496). It is greatly to Dr Ferm's credit that she should have chosen to investigate these complexities. Problems, inevitably, remain; but with her carefully researched and judicious book she has accomplished much. ImperialCollegeLondon C. L. Drage Kutik, Ilya.Writing asExorcism:The Personal Codes of Pushkin,Lermontov, andGogol. Studies inRussian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2005. xiii + 152pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $69.95. In the second line of his Introduction, Gary Saul Morson calls this book an 'inspired, idiosyncratic study' (p.vii). Certainly, it is full of interesting specula tions about individual textsand theirauthors (most notably Pushkin, Lermon tov and Gogol', towhom the bulk of the text is devoted); and the heuristic methods and overall approach are most definitely unconventional. Indeed, Morson goes on to note that 'Kutik disclaims any intention to reveal themeaning of literary works' (p. x), although he does actually deal in literary meaning throughout, albeit in an unusual, indeed 'idiosyncratic', way. Kutik himself sums up his approach ('writingas exorcism') several times in the course of his short book. He says this, for example: 'this book is about personal exorcisms, the ones writers perform while fighting on paper their inner demons, fears, and even fate and death' (p. 3 ? his emphasis). Thus, it is argued, Queen ofSpades contains Pushkin's own personal code thathe used both to tryto exorcize his fear of going mad, as well as to thwart a piece of fortune telling that he would 'live long ifin the thirty-seventhyear of his lifehe could avoid disaster brought to him [...] by blond hair, or by a white man' (P- 23). Even if one were to reject this theory as nonsensical, Kutik's readings certainly provide intriguing insights into his threemain authors, as well as celebrated texts. The reading of Gogol''s use of pseudonyms, for example, is entertaining, while Kutik later draws some interestingand well substantiated parallels between Queen ofSpades and Lermontov's The Fatalist, and between REVIEWS 137 The Nose and Dead Souls, in which noses, or names based around noses, abound. Perhaps the nicest such insight is to see Mirgorod as a pr?figuration ofGogol "s love affairwith Rome, the city of 'urbi et orbi' (pp. 93-94). There are, though, certain problems with this book, some more serious than others.Kutik's actual topics of discussion, such as GogoF's obsession with his nose, or Pushkin's intensely superstitious nature, or his fear of going mad, are all pretty ancient history (and in the case of the last topicKutik seems to be unaware ofGary Rosensheild's excellent Pushkin and theGenres of Madness: The Masterpieces of 1833, which appeared two years before Kutik's book [Madison, WI, 2003]). More broadly, virtually all of his key claims are essen tiallyunprovable. As Kutik himself admits, thisbook is 'a series of speculative essays' (p. 118), and his speculations are signalled by some key choices of words. We read thatGogol' was 'most probably' (p. 7) afraid of the coinci dence of his name with that ofGog, though no evidence is adduced. Later, Kutik isnot shyof admitting thathe isusing guess-work: inQueen ofSpades 'we can guess the identityof the players...

Writing as Exorcism: The Personal Codes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol

This interpretive essay brings a poetic sensibility to bear on the lives and works of three major Russian writers. It is Ilya Kutik's contention that many writers are tormented by secret fears and desires that only writing - in particular, the use of certain words and images - can exorcise. Making this biographical approach peculiarly his own - and susceptible to the nuances of comedy, tragedy and critical equanimity - Kutik reads works of Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol, three Russian writers who were demonstrably subject to the whims, superstitions and talismans that Kutik identifies. Exposing the conjunction of literary effort and private act in writings such as The Queen of Spades, Dead Souls and A Hero of Our Time, Kutik's work aims to provide a new way of understanding these masterpieces of Russian literature and their authors, and a new way of reading the mysteries of life and literature as mutually enriching.

Five operas and a symphony: word and music in Russian culture

In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Gasparov discusses Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

A New Word on 'The Brothers Karamazov' by Robert Louis Jackson

MLR, IOI .2, 2oo6 6I5 banter in the poem and injects something of the disjointedness of reverie which is so effective. In the context of a series investigating the breadth and nature of Pushkin's legacy, it is fitting that the final section should be dedicated to a study of his impact abroad. David Baguley investigates the relationship between Pushkin and Prosper Merimee and points out the similarities in style and choice of subject between the two men. In his chapter on Pushkin and Henry James, Neil Cornwell instances the mechanics of appropriation whereby core aspects of theme and structure in 'The Queen of Spades' are reformulated by his American successor. Finally, in a neat link to the professional affiliation of the two editors of this series, Samantha T. Johnson reveals the little-known episode of Grand Duke Mikhail and Countess Torby's te nancy (she being Pushkin's granddaughter) at Keele Hall in Staffordshire between I90I and I9IO. Two Hundred Years of Pushkin is ambitious in both the number and the variety of angles from which the essays contained therein approach the work and legacy of Alexander Pushkin. And in very large part, itmeets its own aims. This is an impressive and highly informative collection of essays which offers much, not simply to the scholar of Pushkin, but also to the reader interested inRussian and European literature on a broader scale. It stands as a testament to the wealth and importance of the monument of Pushkin and itself becomes an important contribution to Pushkin studies. UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS CLAIRE WHITEHEAD A New Word on 'TheBrothers Karamazov'. Ed. by ROBERTLouis JACKSON. (North western University Press Studies in Russian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2004. Xii+26i pp. $79.95. ISBN o-8ioi I949-8. A New Word on 'The Brothers Karamazov' came together from the proceedings of the last of the Yale Conferences in Slavic Literatures and Cultures in I999, a series inaugurated by Robert Louis Jackson, the editor. The volume pays tribute to the influence of Jackson, one of the most revered of today's Dostoevsky scholars, as the majority of the contributors have cause to refer to his seminal studies, Dostoevsky's Questfor Form (I966; 2nd edn [Bloomington, IN]: Physsardt, I978) and The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I98 I). There are sixteen essays in all, the final one a closing overview by William Mills Todd III. Here, Todd reinforces Jackson's prefatory image of The Brothers Karama zov as a literary Chartres Cathedral, unable to be seen fully from a single point of view, as he acknowledges the wide range of genres and discourses in terms of which the contributors approach the novel. The essays are indeed diverse in their treatments, but there is a cohesion in the volume as awhole that is achieved by an openness in its parts and by the fact that many of the essays complement and illuminate each other. It would be too great a task to discuss all sixteen contributions here, but I hope to show with a few examples how the authors together unveil the multi-faceted yet organically whole nature of The Brothers Karamazov. Lee Johnson offers an original perspective on Smerdiakov as 'would-be saint' (p. 74), discussing the suppressed presence in Smerdiakov of higher spiritual ele ments. For example, he interprets the young boy's question to Grigorii about the origin of light at the Creation not asmockery of the biblical word, forwhich Grigorii unjustly punishes him, but as an intuition of the divine light of God, a crucial factor in the Eastern Orthodox conception of theosis. He argues that Smerdiakov's uncon scious struggles for a closer relationship with the divine, despite his conscious efforts 6i6 Reviews to embrace the doctrine of 'all is permitted'. Following this isVladimir Golstein's article on 'accidental families and surrogate fathers' (p. 90), where he continues the discussion of Grigorii and Smerdiakov, highlighting the former's failures as a father through examples of lack of compassion, dogmatism, and closed-mindedness. Thus he attributes toGrigorii a share of the responsibility for themurder of Fedor Karama zov.Horst-Jurgen Gerigk later completes the...

Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 1988-98 by Rajendra Chitnis

MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 92I disciplined rigour of training, research, and rehearsals and the sheer brilliance of its results in performance. The three chapters of Part II consider specific productions: those adapted from prose, those of the student ensemble, and Dodin's fascinating interpretations of Chekhov. Not all are given equal weight, nor are they discussed in chronological order, and though Shevtsova offers plausible thematic reasons for this, a list of the productions with dates of first performances would have been helpful. But although it is notoriously difficult to capture in the written word the ephemeral art of dra matic performance, and though Dodin's actor-centred theatre, which merges inner psychological depth with often daring and exuberant theatricality-fusing the ideas of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold-presents a particular challenge, it is one Shevtsova meets. Her accounts are vivid, detailed, and evocative, and augmented by the inclu sion of some twenty black and white photos. Her motivation, however, is to analyse how and why the productions were created. Discourse on theatre often relies exces sively on newspaper reviews and other secondary sources, but Shevtsova's research is largely first hand, and the great strength of this book isher access to rehearsals and to Maly Theatre personnel. For Dodin, just as training does not finish in the classroom, a production does not end on a first night but can be modified as itmatures. This is reflected in Shevtsova's writing; discussion of some productions is interwoven with her observations of the rehearsal process and the results in public performance. The Maly is a repertory company whose productions have long lives and are extensively toured. This has allowed her to see some at different times and places and to discuss the role of cultural and socio-political perceptions by comparing critical responses in various countries. In Chapter 6, on Dodin's staging of the operas Elektra, Lady Macbeth ofMtsenk District, and Mazepa, she shows how he brings to bear his experience of dramatic theatre and challenges traditional approaches. But in her final chapter, on The Queen of Spades, forwhich his rehearsal period was much shorter than usual, she can follow the whole journey of the production. In the foreword actor Simon Callow, a dedicated admirer of theMaly, suggests that Dodin's company, as described by Shevtsova, may serve as an inspiring model for new ensembles. But such work makes huge demands on time and money, and indeed the future of theMaly itself is far from secure, so that his hope is perhaps a forlorn one. Nevertheless, this book, though disjointed in structure, gives a fascinating insight into ensemble theatre and actor training, traces several productions through rehearsal to and beyond first nights, and demonstrates both the importance of theMaly in its native city and how richly deserved is its international acclaim. NATIONALUNIVERSITYOF IRELAND, GALWAY Ros DIXON Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, I988-98. By RAJENDRACHITNIS. Abingdon and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. 2005. I95 pp. ?65. ISBN 0-4I5-35557-5. 'My aim here isnot to provide an exhaustive survey of the fiction of this period, but to focus on thework of those writers who, in their fiction or critical articles, characterised themselves as "liberators" of literature' (p. i). The author of this volume pursues his chosen objective admirably and we have abook here which offers valuable insights into and analysis of three literatures as they have evolved over the first decade following the collapse of Communism. We are given some engaging parallels across Russian, Czech, and Slovak literature and Chitnis deals with complex issues with lucidity and, on the whole, balance. He bases his approach on awealth of primary, secondary, and 922 Reviews theoretical material and his conclusions are sound: 'Given that nearly all the writers discussed in this study are still alive and publishing, to suggest that any are finished would be a mistake. However, whereas the tension in the fiction of the Changes initially stemmed from its subversive engagement with dominant conventions, as this study seeks to show, once these had been transgressed, itswriters faced the problem of turning their techniques from weapons of conflict into tools of the...

Qs v.1.3: a parallel version of Queen of Spades

<i>Qs</i> v.1.3: a parallel version of <i>Queen of Spades</i>

Recollecting Wondrous Moments: Father Pushkin, Mother Russia, and Intertextual Memory in Tatyana Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo"

With their references to Alexander Pushkin, Tolstaya's "Night" and "Limpopo" respond to the cultural crisis of 1980s Russia, where literary language, bent for so long into the service of totalitarianism, suffers the scars of amnesia. Recycling Pushkin's tropes, particularly his images of feminine inspiration derived from the cultural archetype of Mother Russia, Tolstaya's stories appear nostalgically to rescue Russia's literary memory, but they also accentuate the crisis of the present, the gap between the apparel of literary language and that which it purports to clothe. "Night," an ironic reworking of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," dismantles the nostalgic imagery of his "Winter Evening." In "Limpopo" the resurrection of Pushkin's feminine muse from his 1825 "To ..." challenges the linear temporality that shapes claims for eternal influence made in "I will build a memorial to myself...." In both stories, Tolstaya exploits paradoxes within Pushkin's œuvre to explore oppositions—present vs. past, cultural expression vs. experience—that limit literary representation in her own time. Tolstaya's allusions to Pushkin ultimately express cynicism about the capacity of literary language to provide authenticity in the wake of totalitarianism, but they also celebrate its persistence as an alternative life force that tears through the deadening banality of Soviet routine.

'Eto' i 'to' v povesti 'Starukha' Daniila Kharmsa by Jussi s&gt; Heinonen (review)

330 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 calling in Russian society, a point taken up in some detail by Marina Kostalevsky in her recent excellent book Dostoevsky and Soloviev:7The Art of Integral Vision (New Haven, CT, I997). For an understanding of Solov'ev's Christian-rooted aesthetics the essay BeautyinNature (i 889) is especially important. Solov'ev has long and quite misleadingly been saddledwith the image of a religiousphilosopherwholly immersed in contemplation of the Divine realm, a quasi-Gnosticscorningor, ignoring as far as possible, realities of the material world. His essay Beautyin Natureprovides a clear corrective to that image: with its detailed analysis employing specific visual and acoustic examples of aesthetically appealing phenomena in nature, this is manifestlya workwrittenby a Christianthinker who 'takes matter seriously'. In the choice of other writings on aesthetics Wozniuk has been very discerning, for the essays included in the collection show Solov'ev'sattitudeboth to utilitariantheoriesof art, so prominent in his day, and to argumentsin favourof 'artfor art'ssake'.His attitudetowardsthe latter arguments is far more critical than one might have expected to find (PP. 137 and 140). The three general essaysBeauty inArt,TheUniversal Meaning of Art and A First Steptowardsa PositiveAesthetic (of I889, I890 and I894 respectively)express many of Solov'ev's dominant preoccupations:the inner coherence or All-Unity of existence, the discrepancybetween 'that which is' and 'that which ought to be', human creativity, the transformative and essentially'prophetic'role of art. Even the subjectof historyis never farfrom Solov'ev's mind when he writes on aesthetics, for human creativity is, unavoidably, located and realized, or made possible, within the course of history, however much aesthetic values may, in themselves, be a-historical. Possibly the feature of Solov'ev's thought which most marks him out as a thinkershaped by the nineteenth century is his enduring preoccupation with history.All of thesemattersarenow setout forthe Englishreaderin Wozniuk's fine translations. Alongside the new abundance of English translationsof Solov'ev'sworksit is worth noting the existence of recently published Dutch translations(2001) and Dimiter Mirchev's Bulgariantranslationsof 7heDramaofPlato'sLifeand of one of Solov'ev'smost substantialworks,J0usti/cation oftheGood. Romanian translationsof certainworkshave also appearedin recentyears. UniversityofLeeds JONATHAN SUTTON Heinonen, Jussi. 'Eto' i 'to' v povesti 'Starukha' Daniila Kharmsa.Slavica Helsingiensia, 22. Department of Slavonic and Baltic Languages and Literatures, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, 2003. 23I pp. Notes. Bibliography. C25.00 (paperback). Jussi HEINONEN'Smonograph seeks to demonstrate the profound formal, structural, topographical, philosophical and religious integrity of Daniil Kharms's Starukha (7he Old Woman). It is the first full-length study of this demanding and elusive text. The starting point for Heinonen's analysis is a philosophical tract, 'On existence, time, space' ('O sushchestvovanii, o vremeni, o prostranstve') REVIEWS 33I writtenby Kharmsin the early 1930s. The treatisecontainssome 6o postulates which include the assertionthat existence comprisesthree elements:'this'(eto), 'that' (to)and the 'impediment' (prepriatstvie), which is 'neither this nor that'. The impediment should not be considered a barrier that divides this from that, but rathersomething that bindsthem. It is Heinonen's assertionthat this hypostatic unity provides Starukhawith its structural and philosophical integrity. Heinonen characterizesetoas the physical, 'real'world which can be seen in the references to Leningradof the era, to work, bodily functions, drinking, sex, and so on. In contrast to is concerned with fantasy, dreams, mystery, fantasy, the absurd or the 'Other' all of which abound and which make interpretation problematic. These categories are not, however, mutually exclusive or indeed stable, for what after all is the timeless figure of the Old Woman doing with a clock, albeitwith no hands? Kharms's narrative unites etoand tonot simply in the text but also in the sub-text. Heinonen's exhaustive exploration of links between characters, images, symbols, locations, sources and archetypes reveals a densely plotted and crafted work. Using the categories of to and etoas an heuristic device allows him to reconcile the apparently chance references to religion and explain the curious ending to Starukha, featuringthe narrator'sovert recognition of God, in termsof what precedes it. FollowingIakovDruskin,Heinonen regardsStarukha asprimarilya religious work. While he acknowledges the inter-textual links of Kharms's work with nineteenth-century Russian classics(notablyDostoevskii'sIdiotand Pushkin's Queen ofSpades), it...