REVIEWS 357 even in one instance involved direct collaboration with the illustrator Milton Glaser,whodesignedthe1957DoubledaycoverforPnin.AsMaliszewskiargues, Nabokov ‘composed his fiction according to the same standards [of] purpose, sense, and accuracy’ that he applied to his visualization of the design of his books (p. 213), but these standards have rarely been fully realized by publishers, even under optimum conditions. In Russia, for example, where owning a copy of Lolita graduated from an act of ‘political audacity’ during the Brezhnev years to a post-perestroika gesture of refinement and cosmopolitanism, it has now become a symbol of much-vaunted status. In his essay, Yuri Leving describes a new market that supplies the Putin-era nouveau riche with ‘sumptuous’ limited editions produced by ‘boutique’ publishers who are sadly more concerned with offering a lavish aesthetic experience than reflecting the novel’s true content (p. 200). Nabokov would, however, doubtless have been pleased with the integrity and quality of Bertram and Leving’s book. From its cover, which pays homage to the green of the Olympia Press edition, to its ample and beautifully reproduced colour illustrations and the cover-sized artworks at its centre, Lolita — the Story of a Cover Girl presents a fascinating, multi-dimensional study that foregrounds, for the first time, the nuances and complexities of the production processes that guide and continuously revise our responses to Nabokov’s art. UCL SSEES Barbara Wyllie Kozlov, Denis. The Readers of ‘Novyi mir’: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. x + 431 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $55.00: £40.95. This well organized and nearly always very well style-edited monograph is important for two main interconnected reasons. First, it contains extracts from numerous readers’ letters about, and certain experts’ internal reviews of, several works that appeared in or, as with Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Grossman’s Life and Fate (which Tvardovskii read in October 1960, before he knew about Solzhenitsyn’s One Day — see the notes in his diary on pp. 167–68), were submitted to and rejected by Novyi mir between 1953 and 1969. Secondly, great attention is paid (see ‘Language’ in the Index) to the Russian, ‘Soviet’ language in which most of these comments were written, and an attempt is made by Denis Kozlov to ascertain how much the general rhetoric and style had altered by the late 1960s. ‘It was then that the voices in at least some letters changed, not so much in what but in how the letter writers argued’ (p. 254). By then, ‘Reconceptualizing the truth also meant rejecting the media language, which was compromised as a product of Stalin’s time’ (p. 282). This SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 358 may persuade some readers to take much more seriously Siniavskii’s apparently flippant remark in 1966 that he had (merely) stylistic differences with the prevailing political and ideological system. Kozlov notes ‘the gradual but comprehensive reassessment of the historical, moral, and linguistic foundations of the established order’ (p. 111). Indeed, Tvardovskii himself finally realized that coming to terms with the Stalinist (if not ‘Soviet’) past was impossible ‘within the existing framework of ideas, ethical models, and literary conventions’ (p. 237). In connection with One Day of Ivan Denisovich, Kozlov writes that ‘The language and ethical order upheld in the Soviet media were categorically unsuitable for interpreting or even describing the tragedies of the twentieth century. […] These objectives required a new system of values and a new verbal order. […] The power and significance of One Day was that it not only urged the readers to rethink their past but also offered them the ethical and linguistic terms for doing so’ (p. 237, and see also pp. 166–67). The study of thousands of readers’ letters to periodicals and newspapers, perused by Kozlov in some thirteen archives, mainly in St Petersburg and Moscow, begins with reactions to V. Pomerantsev’s article, On Sincerity in Literature(December1953)andisbalancedlaterbyargumentsaboutV.Kardin’s article, Legends and Facts (February 1966). As an excellent example of what can be lost in translation, one reads with horror (p. 355) that iskrennost´, the Russian word for sincerity, was rendered in an English-language book published as recently...