Laqueur suggests, likewise afflicted with sympathy to Marxism, nevertheless found itself out of tough with and its culture, having lost itself instead in models and political agendas.

Vladimir Brovkin Harvard University

Andrew Baruch Wachtel. An Obsession with History: Russian Writers Confront the Past. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. viii, 276 pp. $35.00.

� In a grand sweep from Catherine the Great to Solzhenitsyn Wachtel pursues the Russian conviction "that neither fiction nor nonfiction alone was sufficient for a full representation of crucial moments of the nation's past, but rather that a full picture could only come from [their] dialogic interaction" (p. 179). Slavists may well find that this overarching thesis drifts perilously close to the obvious, but the virtues of this book lie in the variations it plays on a potentially leaden melody. Wachtel inspects Catherine's plays and notes on pre-Muscovite Russia, Karamzin's Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, Pushkin's Istoriia Pugacheva and Kapitanskaia dochka, Toistoi's Voina i mir, Dostoevskii's Dnevnik pisatelia and Bratia Karamazovy, Khlebnikov's utopian fic- tions, Vasilii Kamenskii's cycles, Tynianov's Kiukhlia, and Solzhenitsyn's Krasnoe koleso. The labors of Leopold von Ranke in the early nineteenth century to reorient the historian's craft along the principles of textual analysis effectively segregated the dis- cipline from the pretenstions of the noninitiate. Yet everywhere writers refused to be excluded by the newly defined enterprise. Scott's novels offered one return road to history, and Hawthorne invented the "romance," which, unlike the novel, aimed at "the truth of the human heart" rather than "minute fidelity ... to the probable and ordinary." Russians, Wachtel asserts, took advantage of a preexisting fluidity in their literature to experiment within and across the genres already available to them. Moreover, in an autocratic land where historiography could never aspire to the dispassion of a Ranke-IVicholas I insisted that Pushkin's history of Pugachev include "bunP' in the ti- tle-the field of history-writing remained curiously vacant, an invitation to the practi- tioner of belles lettres. In broad terms Wachtel claims that professional history as received by Russians aligns with Hawthorne's "novel." For Russian writers, however, historical truth does not reside in the rival claims of a Romantically conceived imagination. Rather, Wachtel asserts, truth is the outcome of contrasting accounts of an event, and Russians typi- cally produce mulflple versions. Furthermore-again a national idiosyncrasy-Rus- sians keep track of these acts of generic triangulation. There is a histolyto the Russian obsession with history. Much of this book's rhetoric logically involves the figural fields of conversation and containment. Wachtel takes pains to describe the nature of a given writer's multigeneric engagement with history and to suggest the frame within which the contest is waged. Karamzin's history discloses a skirmish between the professional scrupulousness of the notes and the patriotic sermon it preaches on "the monumental and inexorable forward motion" of Russia (p. 51). Pushkin pretends that Kapitanskaia dochka is a memoir appended to his Pugachev history. Anna Scherer's party could be read as history. Dostoevskii's Dnevnik "includes" Brat'ia Karamazov much as it does "Bobok," and Tynianov's Kiukhlia uncrowns the historically constructed Pushkin-god by working against, in this case, literary history. Within or between, anterior or posterior, intrinsic or extrinsic to one author, Wachtel uses these permutations to produce a - onomy of the dialogue between history and fiction. One needs an evaluative word for these variations. Since the 1960s our profession has seen inter-and infra-textual contradiction as the telltale of cultural and social im- passe, or as the problematizing of writing. The opposite camp is represented by Bakhtin, who for a while plays a ghostly and destructive hand in Wachtel's argument, offering him the chance to see dialogue as a guarantor of intellectual freedom and cross-generational discourse, indeed as the parent of history. But the author retreats from such optimism at the end, making clear that the "truth" which dialogue is in- tended to uncover has been left undefined by Russians. Indeed, Wachtel rightly wor- ries that a sophistic plurality of voices might usher in mere unbelief. D. A. Miller has advanced the complementary theory that unchecked literary dialogism will drive peo- ple to prefer the simplifications of the tyrant. There are secondary questions raised by Wachtel's book. Russians are not uniquely prone to enjoy collisions of fictional and historical reality. American literature has produced rival emplotments of the same "fabula": Cooper (the U.S. Navy), Irving (New York), Whitman (the Civil War), and Sandburg (Lincoln). The constructs of Pa- terson, New Jersey in W. C. Williams and Nat Turner in William Styron exist only as end-products of an internecine, Karamzin-like battle between imagination and the his- torical record. The question Wachtel's work poses, then, is why Russians have been obsessed with their obsession with history, as Americans have not. The book offers two persuasive reasons: a wish to fill in suppressed gaps in the official record and the need to revisit a crisis and fleetingly entertain an unrealized outcome (Solzhenitsyn on the fall of the Romanovs). Wachtel's theses clarify what drew Pushkin to Pugachev, Tolstoi to the Decembrists, and the Futurists to Stenka Razin. They also explain Schiller's intergeneric stagings of the Thirty Years War, a conflict that gave birth to the Prussian power he detested, and H. G. Wells' multiple accounts-in novel, history, and biology textbook-of the scientific progress he admired and feared. There is a second question here. Despite Wachtel's sparkling defense of Krasnoe koleso, its aesthetic virtues remain obscure to the West and its historical significance goes unnoticed by a distracted, perhaps distractable Russian public. (Predating Kras- noe kolesa is a more forceful dialogue between Solzhenitsyn's stories, which typically describe the murder of virtue by a dehumanizing social order, and the GULag, which does the same.) in any event, Solzhenitsyn's case makes one wish to examine the mo- ment of reception of the texts Wachtel studies, and ask why the Russian passion for intergeneric writing can sometimes infect a broad segment of the population (Dostoevskii's Dnevnik) but at other times stop with the writer. At moments Wachtel seems to be hunting the Russian Ciio with an elephant gun. Distinctions are lost. In reading Tolstoi, Wachtel does not consider the difference be- tween an empty historical discourse and one full of contradiction, or note that over the