I38 SEER, 84, I, 2006 this sortof reduction would have helped. Languagesare sometimes mixed for titles (Venetian Games,but Troispoemesd'Henri Michaux),and there are a few typographicalerrors:Tchaikousky(p. 86), lanuguages (p. I84), Block instead of Bloch (head of p. 208), Pawet instead of Pawel (p. 3Io). Endnotes and bibliography are extensive and appendices useful, though they contain some historical detail that might have found its way into the main body of the chapters. Polish Musicsince Szymanowski is an invaluablebook that offersa comprehensive survey of music since the I920S in a country whose composers have changed more dramaticallythan in perhaps any other, and whose historical and political misfortunes brought out a national determination that was to resultin some of the most creatively-chargedworksof art of the last century. Why Poland, of all former Eastern-bloc countries, should become such a leading force in internationalcontemporarymusic from I960 is an intriguing question, and one only partially answered here. But Adrian Thomas shows real scholarshipand conveys genuine enthusiasm, proving himself to be one of the most impressiveadvocatesof contemporaryPolishmusic. Music,School ofArtsHistories andCultures JOHN CASKEN University ofManchester d'Amelia, Antonella (ed.).Pietroburgo capitale dellacultura Russa/ Peterburg stolitsa russkoi kul'tugy. Europa Orientalis, 5: I; 5:2. Dipartimento di StudiLinguistici e Letterari,Universityof Salerno, Fisciano, 2004. 4I4 pp; 458pp. Illustrations.Notes. Priceunknown. THIS two-volume collection of articlespreparedby Antonella d'Amelia is one of the last of numerous publications celebrating the 3ooth anniversaryof St Petersburg in 2003. Comprising works by forty scholars writing in four languages(articlespublishedin Italianareaccompaniedby EnglishorRussian summaries),richlyillustrated,including publicationsof unknowndocuments, it encompasses the whole historyof the city startingin the period immediately preceding its foundation through to the end of the twentieth century. There has been no attempt to give the collection a unifyingvision or to fit individual contributions within a rigid general framework. Rather, these two volumes celebrate the diversity of Petersburg life, presenting the city not only as a national, but as a Europeanculturalcapital. Rather unsurprisingly,the central parts of both volumes are occupied by cycles of articleson arts and literaturein and about St Petersburg.However, these two parts are preceded and followed by smallerblocks of contributions discussing 'the foundation of the city and the project of Peter I', 'Petersburg seen by the eyes of foreigners'and 'everydaylife in Petersburg'. The debates about the foundation of St Petersburgin Russian culture are traditionally dominated by historiosophic or metaphysical discourse, often organized around basic oppositions like Russia versus 'The West', individual versusthe state, cultureversusnature, and so on. This approach resonatesin the articles by Ivan VerWon St Petersburg as the city of memory, Danilo Cavaion on the role of the intelligentsia in the 'city of Peter' and Rosanna REVIEWS I39 Casari on 'Petersburgas a Jerusalem built on blood'. On the other hand, Maria Pliukhanova'ssurveyof recent researchundertakenin the semiotics of the Petrine epoque is much more historically focused and innovative. She presentsa convincing hypothesis,arguingthat the opponents of the reformsof the revolutionary tsar were driven not so much by national traditionalism rooted in the obstinate refusal of the Old Believers to accept changes, but rather by the cultural impulse borrowed from the Catholic counterreformationand Polishbaroque. Thus, Russia is seen as part of a largerpanEuropean debate about the strategies of religious, political and cultural modernization, sharing the language and symbolism of these debates with other regions of the European periphery of the late seventeenth-century, particularlyItaly and Poland. The explicit parallelsbetween Peter the Great and Constantine the Great as founders of new imperial capitals testifyto the force of this language. The fact that the fierce opposition to Peter'sreforms, including the foundation of Petersburg,does not have to be traditionalisticor nationalistic is also demonstrated in the following article by Marie-Aude Albert on the twentieth-centurypoet MaksmilianVoloshin. Other sections of both volumes consistmainly of case studies.The smallest, but not at all the least interesting of them deals with St Petersburg as experienced by foreigners. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, the articles cover a wide-ranging time-span, from the visits by Count Michele Enrico Sagramoso, a cavalier of the Order of Malta (MarialuisaFerrazzi),to a book on post-Soviet Petersburgby the German writer Ingo Schultze published in 1995 (LuciaPerroneCapano). The gap...