REVIEWS 54I II, and were later added to by them with the increasing participation of Western colleagues and institutions, and then quarried in short order by scholarsin Russiaaftertheirintellectualagendaswere changed by the collapse of the USSR. The facts are set out using a minimal scaffoldingof narrative form, relyingheavily on bare listsof names and titles, alphabeticalin the first case and chronological in the second, with all the unhelpful 'objectivity'this implies. And when there is evaluation, it is unsubtle. In fact the tone of the book is almoststakhanovite,but in any case hideouslyreminiscentof cold-war Soviet publicationsintended for a foreign readership:relentlesslybanging on about quantity of production as the self-evidentlyprimaryindicator of merit (orrather'achievement'),and completelylackingin ironyor any otherkindof humour, especially self-directed, but with the political values mechanically reversed. The insistent use of the word perevorot to refer to the October Revolution is the most frequent example of this blinkered revisionism. The tone of the book is completely at odds with the fugitivequalityof much of the writing and thinking it documents; symptomatically, Kodzis argues (PP. 51-57) for replacing the best-established concept found in existing discussionsof his subject,the 'ParisNote' (parizhskata nota)associatedwith the 1930s poets, with 'The ExistentialNote', the old termapparentlybeing among other things too wimpy and defensivefor him. Kodzis's triumphalismreaches an apotheosis in the final chapter, which trumpetssome general conclusions while paradingyet more lists. Meanwhile, a more enlightening application of quantity as a criterion of merit would seek to inform the reader about such matters as the size of print runs and the extent and sources of subsidy, but Kodzis does not; we are left uninformed,as elsewhere,aboutjust how much Russianemigreliteraturewas actually sold over the counter. There is another and more seriouslarge-scale shortcoming, though: Kodzis has drawn comprehensively on Russian and German sources in particular,but he either lacks regard for or perforce has had limited access to English-languagescholarship,especially that published since I990 and in otherthan book form.The scale and seriousnessof omission may be indicatedby citingjust one example:BrianBoyd'sNabokov. 7The Russian rears(London, I990). The beginner, then, will find in Kodzis a very useful general introductionto the early historyof twentieth-centuryRussian culture outside Russia, but should bear in mind that his master-of-all-he-surveystone is deeply misleading. NVewt College, Oxford G. S. SMITH Weir, Justin. 7he Authoras Hero:Sef and Tradition in Bulgakov, Pasternak, and Nabokov. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2002. XXiV ? 147 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. $79.95. THE object of interest of this study is the reshaping of the Russian literary tradition of psychological prose in three major modernist novels. Its focus is on how, in Justin Weir's own words, 'the psychological focus shifts from how people understand the world to how authors understand the relationship between their creativity and their identity' (p. 104). Weir devotes three 542 SEER, 8i, 3, 2003 separate chapters to examination of the narrativestructureof TheMasterand Margarita, DoctorZhivago, and TheGift,highlighting the key importance of the encapsulating device of the miseen abimein this reconfiguration. While the fusion of author, literary history and 'selfhood' that Justin Weir finds remarkableis arguablynot, as he suggests (p. 7I), only to be found in these novels (a case might be made forthatothernovel of the same period, Olesha's Envy,for example), there is nothing but profit to be had from setting these three multi-faceted, highly individual novels alongside each other. They sit well together. More importantly,they generate more meaning by the simple fact of theirjuxtaposition. It is a merit of Weir's approach that he does not force comparisons, nor constrainthe textsin the straitjacketof a uniformcriticalmethod. Connections are made in the introductionaridconclusion and in a few bridgepassages(see especially pp. 70-73), but the chapters on the individual novels can stand quite independently of each other, and in each Weir has looked to find the critical idiom best suited to account for the particular narrative strategy employed by the author.Predictablyand appropriately,he drawsmost readily on the Russian Formalists,Tynianov, Jakobson, Eikhenbaum, as well as on Bakhtin. For Bulgakov he finclsthe best critical language in discourse and Bakhtinianparody;for Pasternakhe employsJakobson's distinctionbetween metaphor and metonymy; for TheGifthe takes up Nabokov's own...