The Literary Lorgnette: Opera in Imperial Russia. By Julie A. Buckler. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. [vii, 294 p. ISBN 0-8047-3247-7. $45.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Julie A. Buckler's The Literary Lorgnette: Opera in Imperial Russia is a valuable addition to our understanding of development of Russian culture during nineteenth century. The central thrust of her argument is that western opera-including its plots, characters, and performers-was an extremely important component of Russian culture far beyond confines of opera house. What has sometimes been seen as a zero-sum contest between western European and Russian homegrown culture is shown to be developmcnl of a triumphant Russian culture which incorporates both streams. Buckler's book succeeds in showing how that assimilation took place in area of opera as musical genre, literary topic, and social activity; she shows how opera in all its facets was experienced by audiences and incorporated into realist literature of nineteenth century. For music historians, this study is a worthy addition to that of Robert Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981) and more recent Ital'yanshchina chapter in Richard Taruskin's Defining Russia Musically (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Each of three studies addresses a different aspect of mid-nineteenth-century Russian musical culture, although some of Buckler's ideas can be seen in embryo in Taruskin's chapter. A fourth book, Murray Filme's The St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters: Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia 1900-1920 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000) while treating a later period, has a pertinent introduction, including historiography of Imperial Theater. In each of her seven chapters Buckler analyzes historical accounts of Russian social and cultural through techniques of literary criticism, including new historicism, feminist criticism, and semiotics. She takes on a formidable task and arrives at a valid overall picture. As always, though, devil is in details. In general, her application of techniques of literary criticism to Russian social and cultural landscape, still old regime during period under examination, does not take enough account of significant differences between Russia and bourgeois society of western Europe. Given that audience for this book is not likely to have much acquaintance with autocracy under Nicholas I, Alexander II and III, or with social struture of a society still comprised of a small elite and an enormous underclass, some of her phrases-for example the vast and inclusive space of cultural life (p. 1), ordinary citizens (p. 16), and middle classes (p. 44)-require mapping onto a social template that differs significantly from that of contemporaneous western Europe. The book makes somewhat mysterious society of Russia seem quite understandable, but this may be an illusion that should be dispelled or at least qualified. The chapter that will interest historians of theaters and audiences particularly is chapter 2, Attending Opera. Here Buckler begins with a concise account of choppy narrative of structures built, reconstructed, renamed, and consumed by fire (p. 17). But description of theaters and theater troupes of capital-the Bolshoi, Malyi, Aleksandrinskii, Mikhailovskii, and Mariinskii-useful as it is, does not satisfy desire for a clear longitudinal account of repertory, social custom, and class makeup of specific theaters, which changed greatly over century (as did Russian cities themselves). The author has included descriptions of opera performances and audiences in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, and Odessa through eyes of memoirists, letter writers, and Soviet scholars (among them Zotov [1860], Losskii [latter part of nineteenth century], Skal'kovskii [1899], Grossman [1926], and Nikolaeva [1984], all cited in Buckler's bibliography). …