SEER, 98, 2, APRIL 2020 364 presented in 1990 at a conference at NYU, and are thus explicitly retrospective of a period just closed. Egon Bondy, a generation older than Jirous, writes how an earlier wave of dissident culture (not yet known by that name) in the 1950s drew inspiration from the interwar Czechoslovak avant-garde, as well as from the Beat poets in the United States. Bondy became a hero to the 1970s Underground generation, who rediscovered his earlier work and set his texts to music. Jáchym Topol’s essay is particularly welcome, as it focuses on the younger generation of the Underground who came of age in the 1980s, about whom very little is available in English. The volume is ably edited by one of the leading authorities on post-war Czechoslovak alternative culture, and in particular the bibliographic references are extremely valuable. Regrettable is the absence of a substantial historical introduction: the editor’s ‘epilogue’ assumes that readers are familiar with the general historical events of the period, which means the volume will appeal more to an audience already knowledgeable about Czechoslovakia but seeking more granular detail. But that too is a most welcome contribution. UCL SSEES Peter Zusi Epstein, Mikhail. The Phoenix of Philosophy: Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953–1991). Bloomsbury Academic, New York and London, 2019. viii + 300 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Indexes.£90.00. It has been said that prior to the late nineteenth century Russia had produced more than a few very interesting thinkers but remarkably few philosophers. The author of this extraordinarily valuable monograph avoids the problem of definition and differentiation by using the words ‘philosophy’ in his title and ‘thought’ in his subtitle, and proceeds to present the writings of some three dozen men and two women, nearly all of whom did not know for sure or even perhaps hope that they were living in the last Soviet decades of Russian history. The front cover of this book portrays seven of the most well-known intellectuals/intelligenty who were working in the USSR during part or all of this period: Bakhtin, Losev, Lidiia Ginzburg, Pomerants, Mamardashvili, Averintsev and Lotman, whose names and areas of interest should be familiar to everyone who claims to be knowledgeable about Russian culture at that time and now. However, just in case, Mikhail Epstein provides very useful and accurate summaries of their ideas, concluding that ‘[r]arely in the history of thought has philosophy served as so liberating a force as in Russia from the 1950s through the 1980s’ (p. 233). Already on page 5 the author suggests that in the Soviet Union filosofiia was not the exact equivalent of philosophy elsewhere, REVIEWS 365 so he prefers to use the term ‘philosophical thought’. After all, in the USSR, he claims, perhaps provocatively, ‘the official label “philosophy” was reserved for Marxism only’ (p. 77). In addition, ‘late-Soviet culturology cannot be reduced to what is known in the West as “cultural studies”’. The former is not a type ‘of oppositional politics, because it departs in principle from the political accentuation of culture’. ‘Rather it critiques politics — as a type of discourse, as a relation of power, as a narrow pragmatism — from the standpoint of culture as a whole’ (pp. 232–33). As a result, ‘[o]f all the philosophical trends that attempted to undermine the ideological hegemony of Soviet Marxism, culturology proved the most successful’ (p. 233). The book is divided into four parts: ‘Vicissitudes of Soviet Marxism’, ‘NeoRationalism , Structuralism, and General Methodology’, ‘The Philosophy of Personality and of Freedom’ and ‘Culturology, or, the Philosophy of Culture’. Epstein may expect his readers to tackle them in this order, but it might be better for those not very well grounded in ‘philosophical thought’ to start with the sections on thinkers already well-known in the West, such as Aleksandr Iakovlev, Mikhail Prishvin, Mihajlo Mihajlov, Joseph Brodsky, Aleksandr Esenin-Vol´pin, Arkadii Belinkov, Andrei Amal´rik, Andrei Sakharov, Natan Eidel´man, Aleksandr Ianov, Dmitrii Likhachev and Sergei Averintsev. For this reviewer, the three most stimulating discoveries were Iurii Davydov (Part 1, pp. 54–60), Vasilii Nalimov (Part 2, pp. 99–103) and Iakov Druskin...