REVIEWS 741 text the latter opera was based. Also discussedhere arejazz and rock, as well as the phenomenon of VladimirVysotskii. Amongst the musical and other figures discussed by Shnitke in Part Two are Prokof'ev, Gershkovich, Oleg Kagan, Fazil' Iskander (briefly),Rikhter and ludina. In PartThree the musicians and artistswho write about Shnitke are Rostropovich, Kremer, Rozhdestvenskii,Iankilevskiiand Lubotskii. Few contemporary composers of any country can have had so many difficultiesplaced in theirway by the authorities,and yet been championed so successfullyby their musical colleagues both during and after their lifetimes. This fascinatingcompendium thoroughlydeservestranslationinto English.In the meantime anglophone readershave Ivashkin'sexcellent I997 study of the composer, and, from the same hand, A Schnittke Reader(Bloomington, IN), which appearedin 2002. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies ARNOLD MCMILLIN University College London Kepley, Vance, Jr. TheEndofStPetersburg. KINOfiles Film Companions, Io. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2003. iX+ 122 pp. Map. Illustrations . Notes. Furtherreading.fI 2.99 (paperback). 'WHEN most Western scholars comment on Soviet silent cinema, certain characterizationscome forwardimmediately: radical editing practices, mass heroes instead of individual protagonists, collectivist ideologies. Pudovkin's workmay not belie these common characterizations,but he demonstratesthe possiblebenefitsof more multidimensionaldescriptions.TheEndofStPetersburg borrowsfrommore than one stylisticand narrativetradition,andputsforward a historicalaccount of revolutionthat takesaccount of boththe individualand the mass. The film matches perfectly conventional editing with avant-garde devices. It gives us nuanced, psychologically defined characters along with mass scenes of epic events. And to Pudovkin's everlasting credit, he argues that the ultimate reward of a collectivist system is, finally, its benefits to the collective'sindividualmembers'(p. I02). Vance Kepley acknowledges the place of Vsevolod Pudovkin in the pantheon of 'the great and the good' and the statusof TheEndofStPetersburg [Konets Sankt-Peterburga,1927] as a film classic. His KINOfile companion, clearly organized and straightforwardly written, should prove an ideal introduction for students of history, politics, Russian culture and cinema. Kepley's analysisdemonstratesthatreceivedopinion isworthyof examination even while it is sometimes endorsed. The book follows the familiar pattern of the series, describing the action covered by the film sequence by sequence between I914 and I9I7 (including a discussionof the provisionaltitleand epic schema, St Petersburg-Petrograd- -Leningrad). The film thereby refers, he suggests, as much to the circumstances of the I920S as to the events it depicts. The production context of the film is compared to that of others commissioned for the tenth anniversaryof the Revolution, including Eisenstein's October [Oktiabr',1928], for the stateowned company Sovkino, and Boris Barnet's Moscowin October [Moskvav 742 SEER, 82, 3, 2004 Oktiabre, 1927], a stable-matefor Pudovkinat the commercialfirm,Mezhrabpom . Kepley shows how Pudovkin's film benefited both procedurally and stylisticallyfrom the concurrentactivitiesof Eisenstein.In addition, he says,it drew on the example provided by Hollywood in D. W. Griffith'sIntolerance (I9I6), and in popular American films imported into Russia under NEP (192 I-28/9), thereby becoming something of a hybrid:Kepley thus pursues arguments which he has previously outlined elsewhere ('Pudovkin and the classicalHollywood Tradition', Wide Angle,7, I985, 3, and 'Pudovkinand the Continuity Style', Discourse, 17, 1995, 3). A stylisticanalysis is followed by a discussionof the film's reception in Russia (by the audience for whom it was intended)and, subsequently,at home and abroad.The book'sillustrationsare a credit to the care taken by Pudovkin's cameraman, Anatoli Golovnia, to achieve particular effects. Kepley indicates how much of the historical background would have been familiar at the time of the film's release and quotes Lunacharskii'sappeal for an aesthetic synthesisof entertainment and propaganda:'Militantfilmsthat failed to entertainpromised to produce only "boring agitation ...] it is well-known that boring agitation is counteragitation "' (p. 25). Kepley's historical contextualization includes an examination of what Pudovkin chooses to show (a caricature of Kerenskii'sProvisional Government ) and to suppress (Lenin's machinations to increase his power base), representing the October Revolution, he says, as bottom-up rather than topdown political action. He demonstrates how the film follows an approved Marxist narrative model, presenting Imperialism (St Petersburg), through Revolution (Petrograd) to Communism (Leningrad) and how, as in other Soviet fictions, a peasant lad and a woman are enlightened by their experience of war and want, and mentored by a committed Bolshevik. Kepley indicates...