Generate “Fin-De-Siècle Malaise.” One Can Only Speculate on What Happened in the Process Between Book Proposal and Final Submission

H-Soyuz December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!

Discussion published by Jennifer Carroll on Saturday, January 7, 2017

Dear Soyuz Members,

Please find below the newest book review round up, which includes the final batch of reviews published in the month prior to December 1, 2016.

Today’s round up includes 79 reviews from seven journal issues, as follows:

Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 5: Review 1

Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 6: Reviews 2-12

Religion, State, and Society Vol 44, Issue 3: Reviews 13-14

Central Asian Survey Vol 35 Issue 4: Reviews 15-20

Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 2: Reviews 21-45

Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 3: Reviews 46-72

East European Jewish Affairs Vol 46 Issue 2: Reviews 73-79

I also have the pleasure of announcing a new book written by a Soyuz Member: David Montgomery’s Practicing Islam: Knowledge, Experience, and Social Navigation in Kyrgyzstan. David’s book was published by University of Pittsburgh Press just last month.

According to the press, “Montgomery presents a rich ethnographic study on the practice and meaning of Islamic life in Kyrgyzstan. Through his years of on-the-ground research, he assembles both an anthropology of knowledge and an anthropology of Islam, demonstrating how individuals make sense of and draw meanings from their environments. This book offers the most thorough English-language study to date of Islam in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan.”

More information can be found here: https://www.upress.pitt.edu/BookDetails.aspx?bookId=36680

Please join me in congratulating David on his new book!

As always, if you have recently published a book, OR if there is a journal, which we have not included in this round up but which you think deserves our attention, please email me directly at [email protected].

Best,

Jennifer Carroll Soyuz Book Review Editor

Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 5

1) The politics of gender culture under state socialism: an expropriated voice, Hana Havelková and Libora Oates-Indruchová, eds. 2014, New York: Routledge.

AND

Women, communism, and industrialization in postwar Poland, by Malgorzata Fidelis. 2010: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

AND

The left side of history: World War II and the unfulfilled promise of communism in Eastern Europe, by Kristen Ghodsee, 2015: Raleigh, Duke University Press.

AND

Love in the time of communism: intimacy and sexuality in the GDR, by Josie McLellan. 2011: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

AND

Gen si reprezentare în România comunist ̧ ă, 1944–1989 [Gender and representation in communist Romania, 1944–1989], by Luciana Jinga. 2015: Iasi, Polirom (review article by Maria Bucur).

“Taken together, the five studies also reveal important differences among these European societies, which continued and were amplified through the choices made by the state socialist regimes. These very differences enable us to better appreciate the extent to which any statements regarding gender equality reflected core principles or were just expedient propaganda. Overall, it appears that while in Bulgaria and the GDR such goals found their expression in long-term policies, they were used with greater flexibility and far less consistency in Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Poland.”

Nationalities Papers Vol 44 Issue 6

2) Ethnic Politics in the Baltic States. V. V. Poleshchuk and V. V. Stepanov (eds). 2013, Moscow: Nauka (review by Olga Talal).

“The politics of the Baltic States present puzzling questions about regime stability in political systems where majority-minority relationships are shaped by both democratic and ethnic principles. The volume entitled Ethnic Politics in the Baltic States, co-edited by Vadim V. Poleshchuk and Valery V. Stepanov, published by the Nauka Press in Moscow, presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of ethnic politics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania since 1991, and their consequences for the status of ethnic minorities in these states.”

3) Becoming Muslim in Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy. By Agnis Nilufer Kefeli. 2014, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (review by James Meyer).

“Agnes Kefeli has written a first-rate monograph examining an issue in Russian imperial history that has generally been described in terms of “apostasy.” The “lapsing” of Tatar Christians in the nineteenth century, and the need for tens of thousands of baptized Tatars – or Kräshens, as they are known – to live unofficially as Muslims, is actually a rather old story in the historiography of Russia…Kelefi has brought a fresh perspective to this topic by drawing from a more diverse mix of both Russian and Tatar-language materials.”

4) Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe, by Fred Abrahams. 2015, New York: NYU Press (review by. Lori E. Amy).

“While several studies in recent years have begun to reexamine transition-era politics in Southeast Europe and the Western Balkans, Albania has received very little critical attention…Fred Abrahams’ Modern Albania: From Dictatorship to Democracy in Europe thus offers am much needed retrospective on an often overlooked country…The book is strongest in its thick description of the formation of political parties after the collapse of the Communist regime and the consolidation of political power, in tandem with emerging criminal networks, in the early 1990s.”

5) Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (eds). 2014, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Victor Apryshchenko).

“In one of his interviews the Polish historian Jan Zharyn (Janem Żarynem), who was also elected a Polish senator, mentioned that “Our sacrificial nation is considered as the nation of criminals, and we have to organise the attack in the sphere of historical politics in order to repulse these spiteful accusations.” 1 The cases that are represented in the collective volume demonstrate different attitudes in the sphere of historical politics. Some of them were successful and resulted in “pacification of memory” while others are still require for more elaboration. All of these mean that Eastern European “captivities of memory” will produce new “labyrinths of memory” for researchers.”

6) No illusions: the voices of Russia’s future leaders, by Ellen Mickiewicz. 2014, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Ellen Carnaghan).

“Ellen Mickiewicz’s book is a somewhat balky combination of two different projects. On the one hand, it is an analysis of focus groups with students in three top Russian universities. On the other, it is a discussion of protests in Russia, the bulk of which occurred after the focus groups were concluded. There is quite a bit of interesting material in each part, but it is not always obvious how they inform each other.”

7) The sacred routes of Uyghur history, by Rian Thum. 2014, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (review by Yu-Wen Chen).

“In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of western media reports and academic writings on the tensions between the Chinese government and Uyghur nationalists. Both have different views on who should be the owner of the land known as Xinjiang in today’s People’s Republic of China (PRC). Rian Thum moves away from both competing poles of nationalist discourses

8) A world history of war crimes: from antiquity to the present, by Michael Bryant. 2016, London: Bloomsbury (review by David M. Crowe).

“In a refreshing shift from studies that look at the history of war and, at least over the past few centuries, reactive international laws of war and the laws of armed conflict, Michael Bryant looks more much deeply into the past for hints about the nature of warfare globally, with the eye of an historian and a lawyer. What is refreshing about his approach is that he is not tied down by traditional singular approaches and interpretations of the historian, the legal specialist, or the political scientist, whose analyses are often clouded by the broader strictures of their disciplines. The result is a carefully researched study of warfare since antiquity that was affected, for various reasons, by certain restraints on human and military behavior.”

9) Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1908, by Ipek K. Yosmaoglu. 2014, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (review by Bedross Der Matossian).

“In this well-researched and sophisticated book, Ipek Yosmaoğlu deals with a major question that preoccupies historians of late Ottoman history: how a population which until the nineteenth century lived in relative calmness without experiencing any type of systematic violence turned into one synonymous with ethnic conflict. Through using massive archival material in multiple languages as well as contemporary sources, Yosmaoğlu concentrates on the region of Serres in Macedonia. Unlike nationalist historiographies about the conflict in Macedonia, Blood Ties argues that the “racial” violence in the region resulted from the amalgamation of three factors: the adoption of elites in the Balkan states of an exclusionary form of nation-state, the reluctance of the Ottoman state to reform the region, and the meddling of the European powers to safeguard their interests in the region (2).”

10) Polish Patriotism After 1989. Concepts, Debates, Identities, by Dorota Szeligowska. 2016, Oxford, Peter Lang (review by Krzysztof Jasiewicz).

“From a purely marketing point of view, the book reviewed here could not have been published at a more fortunate time. But this perfect timing is not just a matter of sheer luck: the book is the outcome of a meticulous research conducted over the course of several years (its draft was defended as a doctoral thesis at Central European University). Above all, the author deserves credit for the choice of the topic of her dissertation. In fact, patriotism was hardly ever an abstract virtue in Poland, and labeling one’s political opponents as unpatriotic has been a long tradition there. With the ascent of pluralist democracy in 1989, one would have hoped such practices would pass into oblivion. And they almost did, seemingly being relegated to the ultra-nationalist fringes of the political arena.”

11) Religion, politics and nation-building in post-communist countries, Greg Simons and David Westerlund, eds. 2015, Farnham: Ashgate (review by Tornike Metreveli).

“This book tells us about how the interaction of religion and politics was formed, developed, and organized in former Communist states, what now constitutes a challenge to these relations, and how these challenges can be addressed…The book examines the “secularization debate” by providing

12) Shadowlands: Memory and History in Post-Soviet Estonia, by Meike Wulf. 2016, New York: Berghahn (review by Oleksandra Seliverstova).

“The contesting narratives of the past have been widely studied in the context of the Baltic States. However, previous works mainly identified two conflicting narratives, the local one and the Russian or Soviet one. Accordingly, these narratives became important markers of local collective identities, despite not necessarily being applicable to Russian-speaking communities residing in that region. This book represents a more nuanced understanding of actual collective memories of Estonian pre- war, war, and post-war (WWII) periods. It demonstrates that the split into different narratives does not always happen along ethnic lines, but that belonging to different generations also defines the way people perceive their collective past.”

Religion, State, and Society Vol 44, Issue 3

13) Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Paganism, by Stefanie von Schnurbein. 2016, Leiden and Boston: Brill (review by Kaarina Aitamurto).

“This dense study of modern Germanic Paganism will hopefully reach widely not only scholars, but also practitioners of the German and Nordic native faiths. The book provides a thorough analysis of the ideological roots of contemporary Norse and Germanic Paganism and a critical view of the die- hard exclusivist and othering currents in these traditions. Von Schnurbein’s compelling argumentation challenges both adherents of the religion and scholars of such disciplines as the study of religion and historians to engage in self-reflection and revisit many of their underlying assumptions.”

14) On British Islam: Religion, Law, and Everyday Practice in Shari’a, by John R. Bowen. 2016, Princeton: Princeton University Press (review by Stephen H. Jones).

“John R. Bowen’s On British Islam is a superb book and should be ranked not just as one of the best recent treatments of Islamic law in the UK but of Islam in the UK more generally. It is part of a growing literature on the practice of Islamic law in Britain, joining publications by Samia Bano, Elham Manea, Gillian Douglas et al. and others. What sets it apart from these texts, however, is that it uses Shari’a councils – institutions set up primarily to offer Islamic divorces that have no standing in English law – as a lens through which to examine British Muslim identity, religious leaderships and institutional structures.”

Central Asian Survey Vol 35 Issue 4

15) Nationalism and identity construction in Central Asia: dimension, dynamics, and directions, edited by Mariya Y. Omelicheva. 2015, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (review by Diana T.

Kudaibergenova).

“This collection of essays, edited by Mariya Y. Omelicheva, is an ambitious attempt to re-examine national construction in post-Soviet Central Asia, here defined territorially and historically as the five countries of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The volume examines more than 20 years of independence and nationalism processes in these five states. The eight contributions vary in themes and geographical focus, allowing the reader to dwell on a range of issues, such as the 1916 revolt in Kyrgyzstan (in the chapter by Aminat Chokobaeva), religiosity, and contemporary nation-building dilemmas.”

16) Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus: Migration, democratization and inequality in the post-Soviet era, Sophie Hohmann, Claire Mouradian, Silvia Serrano and Julien Thorez, eds. 2014, London: I. B. Tauris (review by Alima Bissenova).

“This collection develops comparative perspectives on Central Asia and the Caucasus and tackles socio-economic problems facing the region – migration, inequality, lack of transparency and democracy. The 13 chapters are preceded by the Introduction in which Isabelle Ohayon, Silvia Serrano and Amandine Regamey discuss the new reality in which the Caucasus and Central Asia are now a part of the Global South as a result of deindustrialization, economic crisis and growing inequality...The book is subdivided into four loosely related sections whose chapters span subjects from the 19th-century administration of the Caucasus to flows of investments and revenues in the oil sector, to an anthropological study of female migration to Russia.”

17) Leadership and authority in Central Asia: the Ismaili community in Tajikistan, by Otambek Mastibekov. 2014, London and New York: Routledge (review by Frank Bliss).

“This book is very interesting but also, due to its very dense content, quite challenging to readers. It deals with the religious leadership of the roughly 300,000 Ismailis of Tajikistan during approximately the last 100 years, a period characterized simultaneously by profound changes and notable continuity. More precisely, the book refers mainly to the inhabitants of the mountainous area of Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) or the Pamir Mountains area which has been, since the middle ages, an island of Ismaili Shia Islam amongst the majority Sunnis of Tajikistan and the surrounding countries. These Pamiris are so well known as Ismailis that in the country the term Pamiri, inhabitant of GBAO, or Ismaili can almost be used synonymously.”

18) Sotveskii kishlak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiey, by Sergey Abashin. 2015, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (review by Artemy M. Kalinovsky).

“Sergey Abashin’s Sovetskii Kishshak: mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiey [A Soviet qishloq: between colonialism and modernization] is an historical ethnography of Oshoba, a village in Northern Tajikistan, where the author conducted field research in 1995 and returned in 2010. The book is a remarkable achievement that enriches our understanding of the region and demonstrates what can be accomplished by a researcher actively engaging and bridging several scholarly traditions.”

19) Qazaqlïq, or ambitious brigandage, and the formation of the Qazaqs: state and identity in Post- Mongol Eurasia, by Joo-Yup Lee. 2016, Boston: Brill (review by Michael Hancock-Parmer).

“In this ambitious work, Joo-Yup Lee gives the most satisfying analysis of the formation of the Kazakhs yet available in English. His argument is straightforward, though supported by a labyrinth of sources and arguments: that the formation of the Kazakhs in the sixteenth century was a result of ‘the custom of political vagabondage that played an important role in state-formation in post-Mongol Central Eurasia’ (7).”

20) Caucasus during the Mongol Period – Der Kaukasus in der Mongolenzeit, Jürgen Tubach, Sophia G. Vashalomidze, and Manfred Zimmer, eds. 2012, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag (review by Michael C. Brose).

“As the title suggests, this edited volume features essays devoted to various aspects of life in the Caucasus region under the Mongols. Half of the 13 essays are in English and half in German, and the volume as a whole aims to reconstruct and interpret Armenian and Georgian views of the Mongols. The essays range in focus from general treatments, such as Wilhelm Baum’s ‘Die Mongolen und das Christentum’, to very specific studies such as Heiko Conrad’s ‘Beobachtungen und Notizen zur Situation der armenischen Fürsten unter der Mongolenherrschaft’ (see below). A similar breadth of perspective, ranging from clerical to political and military history, is also presented across these essays, and that feature is one of the real strengths of this volume as a unique contribution to Mongol Empire history.”

Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 2

21) The Kreutzer Sonata Variations: Lev Tolstoy’s Novella and Counterstories, by Sofiya Tolstaya and Lev Lvovich Tolstoy. Michael R. Katz, trans, and ed. 2014, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (review by Amy Mandelker).

“Michael Katz’s annotated translations are wonderfully readable, with easy contemporary locutions that do not abrade the ear. In addition to his extremely informative introduction, he provides a useful bibliography of primary and secondary works relating to Lev and Sonya. He has given an invaluable resource to the profession and general readership, and to Sofia Andreevna Tolstaya, the wider audience her writing so amply merits.”

22) L’istituzione del matrimonio in Tolstoj: Felicita familiare, Anna Karenina, La sonata a Kreutzer, by Maria Zalambani. 2015, Florence, IT: Firenze University Press (review by Andrea Oppo).

“The book’s main purpose is to examine the historical transition in nineteenth-century Russian society from “marriages of convenience” to “bourgeois marriage”—the latter being based on reciprocal feelings rather than on patrimonial or political interests. In order to highlight this transition as clearly as possible, Maria Zalambani had to make a selection from among Tolstoy’s output, excluding, for example, War and Peace as still representing an “apogee of combined marriage” (9). Hence the decision to consider the three works, Family Happiness, Anna Karenina, and The Kreutzer Sonata, which respectively emphasize “the moment of transition, the crisis of the institution of combined marriage, and finally its transformation into an affective marriage” (9).”

23) Before They Were Titans: Essays on the Early Works o f Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Elizabeth

Cheresh Allen, ed. 2015, Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press (review by Katherine Bowers).

“Before They Were Titans is a collection of essays on Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s writing before they began their major novels; its focus is Dostoevsky’s works of the 1840s and Tolstoy’s of the 1850s. In her introduction, editor Elizabeth Cheresh Allen consciously moves away from the cliched view that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy stand as great opposing pillars, the “seer of the spirit” and the “seer of the flesh.” Instead she emphasizes their similarities in circumstances and experience when they were young men just beginning their writing careers: each had lost both parents, was unsure about a life devoted to literary endeavor, experienced a young man’s life in a large city, followed a first critically acclaimed work with a series of critical disappointments, and, perhaps most importantly, “the early writings [...] show some provocative kinships, even while suggesting the divergent routes the two authors would eventually take on their way to literary greatness” (3).”

24) The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel, by Russell Scott Valentino. 2014, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press (review by Gary Saul Morson).

“This study represents and will attract attention to “the new economic criticism,” which focuses on the relation of literature to a variety of economic aspects of culture. Often inspired by the work of William Mills Todd, this approach has led to some fascinating insights, including those of my Northwestern colleagues, Susan McReynolds and Seamas O’Driscoll. Developing core ideas of this school, Valentino considers changing ideals of masculine selfhood. His book traces a move from “virtue,” in the classical sense of heroic qualities rooted in the land and real property, to “virtuality,” or what Valentino calls “consensual fantasy,” in which something as free-floating as the symbolic wealth of money became all-important. The result was a new kind of bourgeois masculine selfhood.”

25) Antosha & Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art o f Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan, by Serge Gregory. 2015, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press (review by Carol Apollonio).

“Noting that Chekhov’s life has been thoroughly chronicled by scholars, Gregory structures his book as both a biography of Levitan—the first in English—and a study of his relationship with the writer. This leads to fresh sources: Levitan’s letters to friends; memoirs and letters by patrons and fellow artists; and documents relating to the Russian visual arts at the end of the nineteenth century. Through meticulous scholarship and fine writerly craft, Gregory offers a riveting story of two creative geniuses at work.”

26) Tvorchestvo A. P. Chekhova v svete sistemnogopodkhoda: kollektivnaia monografiia,Vera Zubareva and Marina Larionova, eds. Russian Literature Without Borders. 2015, Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks Publisher (review by Marija Fedjanina).

“This collection of articles consists of two sets, each with a theoretical preface by Vera Zubareva. In the first she introduces the systems approach attributed to Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Relying on Russell Ackoff, she reverses the steps of analysis-synthesis thinking, focusing on the part as interpreted in the context of a whole, as opposed to exploring the whole through an understanding of its parts. Basically, the systems approach is an initial step of the hermeneutical circle, which has been separated into a preliminary interpretation and its inscription into a paradigm. The choice of

27) Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov’s Synthetic Art, by Julia Friedman. 2010, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (review by Adrian Wanner).

“Overall, this is a stimulating and well-researched monograph, which makes a significant contribution to an understudied topic of Russian Modernism. Lavishly produced on high-quality paper with numerous illustrations and colored plates, the book is a fitting tribute to Remizov’s stunning albums. The price tag of seventy dollars (which, amazingly, is ten dollars less than the cost of the plain “Russian Literature and Theory” volumes by the same publisher) is a real bargain. Just like Remizov’s originals, Friedman’s beautiful monograph is a treat for art-lovers and bibliophiles.”

28) Maximilian Voloshin’s Poetic Legacy and the Post-Soviet Russian Identity, by Marianna S. Landa. 2015, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Joseph Schlegel).

“Maximilian Voloshin is all too frequently overlooked in literary and cultural studies for reasons that Marianna S. Landa carefully explores in this timely and well-presented volume. Landa casts Voloshin as an unusually prescient, conscientious, talented, and observant Russian poet. She moves her analysis away from Voloshin’s more common associations with Russian Symbolism to focus on his role as a leading poet of Russia’s immediate post-revolutionary epoch and his enduring legacy in Russia today. Landa’s detailed account of Voloshin’s work and its contemporary and posthumous reception provide a much needed addition to the growing field of Voloshin scholarship and a key resource for anybody interested in twentieth-century Russian society and culture.”

29) Vasily Zhukovsky’s Romanticism and the Emotional History o f Russia, by Ilya Vinitsky. 2015, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (review by Erica Camisa Morale).

“Vinitsky’s new volume brings Zhukovsky to vivid life through its analytical and comprehensive approach as well as its methodology. As the author explains, he combines phenomenological and literary-anthropological approaches in order to avoid an obvious and overly psychological approach while using the biography to analyze Zhukovsky’s literary production. When a scholar is able to do this effectively—as Vinitsky is—biography helps us understand how an author develops his poetics in relation to his time and place. Vinitsky has produced an original study of interest, above all, to scholars of Russian culture and literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”

30) Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev Era Soviet Union, by Samantha Sherry. 2015, Edinburgh, Ireland: Edinburgh University Press (review by Barry P. Scherr).

“Readers will find value both in the close analyses of specific texts as well as in the judicious use of previously unpublished materials, and they will come away with a far better appreciation of the way in which, as is remarked in the conclusion, the censoring of translation was not simply a straightforward operation, but rather a process that involved negotiation among all concerned: party officials, editors, and translators. The story of how all that played out makes for as entertaining reading as many of the literary works themselves.”

31) Kak Erivanskie Kovry/Like a Fine Rug of Erivan/Wie Teppiche aus Eriwan: West-East Poems, by

Alexander Pushkin. Katharina Mommsen and Martin Bidney, ed. Voices of the World in Song, vol. 2. 2013, Palo Alto, CA and New York, NY: Mommsen Foundation and Global Scholarly Publications (review by Boris Gasparov).

“The book presents nearly all Pushkin’s poems that are connected, one way or another, with the “Oriental” theme. Each poem is given in the original alongside poetic translations into English and German. The book is supplemented by three CDs with the poems recited in Russian, English, and German respectively.”

32) Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts, Sibelan E. S. Forrester and Martha M. F. Kelly, ed. Various translators. 2015, Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press (review by Connor Doak).

“Russian Silver Age Poetry: Texts and Contexts is the latest offering in the Academic Studies Press Cultural Syllabus series targeted at undergraduates. The volume’s editors, Martha Kelly and Sibelan Forrester, have created a weighty anthology that surpasses any other collection of Silver Age poetry in English translation. Following the introductory material, the book is divided into two sections of roughly equal length. Section I, “The Poets,” contains some 200 poems by 28 Russian Modernist writers. Section II, “Beyond Poetry,” includes prose from the era that helps contextualize the poetry. This second section is subdivided into “Essays,” “Criticism,” “Memoirs,” and “Other Prose Works.” The latter of these contains excerpts of letters and manifestoes and even a short story by Teffi, giving a flavor of the era’s fiction.”

33) Poems of Osip Mandelstam, by Osip Mandelstam. Peter France, trans. 2014, New York: New Directions Books (review by Natalia Vygovskaia).

“In conclusion, I enthusiastically recommend this book to all connoisseurs and admirers of Mandelstam’s writings and the Silver Age. The translator has admirably rendered the poet’s unique voice and his delicate literary technique. This edition is an important contribution to a course on Mandelstam in translation and should find a welcome home in every international poetry collection.”

34) Subtly Worded, by Teffi. Trans. Anne Marie Jackson with Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Clare Kitson, Irina Steinberg and Natalia Wase. 2014, London: Pushkin Press (review by Tom Dolack).

“The publication of this volume should be cause for celebration for fans of Russian literature, especially those interested in the buried gems of the early twentieth century. Kudos are due to Anne Marie Jackson, the primary translator of the volume, as well as the secondary translators. The English is brisk and lively, as is required by short stories, especially these. On rare occasion the bete noire of all translations from Russian pops up: the colloquial character who sounds like a Disney chimneysweep or a soccer hooligan. But this is a minor quibble and the main characters speak clearly in their own voices. A tip of the hat should also be given to Pushkin Press, who publishes many works that deserve to be better known in small, attractive volumes.”

35) Selected Poems, by Mikhail Yeryomin. Trans. J. Kates. A bilingual edition. 2014, Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press (review by Barry P. Scherr).

“Thus, for all the fine work that went into preparing this volume, it is difficult to avoid wishing that more care had been taken to check both the Russian and the English. Nonetheless, the translations of

36) Paranoia, by Victor Martinovich. Trans. Diane Nemec Ignashev. 2013, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (review by Kirsten Lodge).

“Martinovich plays with language throughout the novel. It is replete with puns, which the translator renders admirably into English and clarifies in her preface and endnotes as necessary. Ignashev also describes the difficult style of the original Russian, which she was sometimes at pains to translate. She further notes that Martinovich draws heavily on the Russian literary tradition, pointing out significant allusions to Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, Nabokov, and Bulgakov, among others. I would add to this list Zamyatin (Part I is entitled “We”), Dostoevsky (particularly Notes from the Underground), and Kafka. In its evocation of authoritarian repression, Paranoia also recalls the works of the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare.”

37) Beautiful Twentysomethings, by Marek Hlasko. Trans. Ross Ufberg. 2013, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press (review by Agnieszka Jezyk).

“Beautiful Twentysomethings is a daring self-portrait, where facts freely mingle with fictions, and the reader is left in the realm of speculation. Much like Witold Gombrowicz in his Diary, Hlasko skillfully plays with his image. The “rebel without a cause” persona slowly unveils itself in the passages concerning the penitentiary system or mental health care in Germany, which—when taken advantage of by a barbarian from the East—turns captivity into opportunity. The author also fuels his audience’s imagination by building upon the gossip about his involvement in pimping. Hlasko masterfully refashions himself as almost an archetypical misfit, a nomad without any sense of belonging except to his mother tongue. In other places, however, he perversely emphasizes his sincerity, for instance, through presenting Goofy the dog as an alter ego figure: “Goofy always had pure intentions and good thoughts, but instead of being able to realize any of his ideas [...] he’d cause a short circuit or a tanker accident, or he’d slam his paw in the door and let out a howl” (75). A path toward reconciling these two opposing images winds through the text. As Tyrmand aptly pointed out, Hlasko “even when lying—and he consisted of tiny endless, at times sinful, other times amazing, nonsensical, or beautiful lies—he always passed some truth” (LT 22). The new translation of “Beautiful Twentysomethings” by Ross Ufberg gives justice to Hlasko’s unique, yet still relatively unheard voice, and exquisitely preserves both the playfulness of his language and the bitterness of his insight.”

38) The Kingdom of Insignificance: Miron Bialoszewski and the Quotidian, the Queer, and the Traumatic, by Joanna Nizynska. 2013, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (review by Anna Krakus).

“Miron Bialoszewski (1922-1983) is one of the most canonical Polish twentieth-century writers and the publication of his “Secret Diary” in 2012 testifies to an ongoing interest in his life and work. While his honest and straightforward writing, which ranges from the deeply personal to the universal, ought to grant him international appeal, he is glaringly absent from English-language scholarship. Joanna Nifynska’s insightful new book stands to change this as it introduces Bialoszewski to the English-speaking world.”

39) Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, by George Z. Gasyna. 2011, London: Continuum (review by John Merchant).

“George Gasyna’s study of the exilic discourse of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz represents an innovative analysis of two remarkable Polish writers who have rarely been considered together in the same critical study. With the help of a complex theoretical framework, Gasyna makes a connection between Conrad and Gombrowicz as writers on either ends of the modernist project through the fundamentally decisive experience of exile. While the nature of exile differed radically for both, Gasyna argues that shared experiences of responding personally and artistically as an “other” in a foreign culture or cultures allowed them to create an in-between space in which they were able “to domesticate” their surroundings and maintain a clear sense of creative and personal autonomy as writers (250).”

40) Rockets and Revolution: A Cultural History of Early Spaceflight, by Michael G. Smith. 2014, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press (review by Michael K. Launer).

“Michael Smith has produced a remarkably rich study of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fascination with the notion of space flight in literature, culture, and—ultimately—as reflected in technological innovation…Smith discusses in great detail the socio-cultural impact rocketry had on people’s imagination during that period. This was only heightened, after the turn of the century, by the studies of the true space pioneers—Hermann Oberth in Germany, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia, and Robert Goddard in the U.S. — and by advances in the design and construction of balloons, which only in the 1930s were capable of carrying intrepid space pioneers on highly publicized, quasiscientific flights into the stratosphere.”

41) Vladimir Markov and Russian Primitivism: A Charter for the Avant-Garde,by Jeremy Howard, Irena Buzinska, and Z. S. Strother. 2015, Burlington, VT: Ashgate (review by Byron Lindsey).

“The book’s structure is simple: Part I—their own essays on Markov—and Part II—five of Markov’s texts, well translated by Howard with his own and his colleagues’ annotations. Markov’s writings provide a rare and archival dimension to the project. Also rare are the reproductions of Markov’s stunning photographs of primal sculptures far from the centers of European imperial power. They eloquently articulate the implications of his texts while illustrating the contributors’ discourses. The essays are Howard’s ‘“ The Treasure-House of World Beauty’: Markov and Russian Primitivism Writ Large”; Buzinska’s “Markov’s Development as a Theoretician” (translated by Howard and Ronald Meyer) and “Markov’s Legacy: Photographs for Art of Northern Asia”; and Strother’s “The Politics of Face in the African Art Photography of Vladimir Markov.””

42) Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia, by Janice Ross. 2015, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (review by Olga Seliazniova).

“Strictly speaking, Like a Bomb Going Off is neither a work of scholarly criticism, nor a work of investigative journalism, nor a biography per se. Rather, it engages all of these genres. Because of this, the book will appeal to a wide variety of readers who are interested in the history of ballet during the Soviet period. Ross slowly and methodically peels back layers of Russian history and culture to argue that ballet is endowed with great subversive potential and can therefore serve as an

43) Žižek and his Contemporaries: On the Emergence of the Slovenian Lacan, by Jones Irwin and Helena Motoh. 2014, London: Bloomsbury (review by Tetyana Shlikhar).

“In Zizek and his Contemporaries, Jones Irwin and Helena Motoh, both lecturers in Philosophy, have united their effort and expertise — Motoh’s local insight into Slovenian political and intellectual dynamics and Irwin’s profound knowledge of French philosophy of the 1960s and the 1970s—to make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Slovenian philosophical thought and preconditions of its development. The book explores the complex dynamics of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis and focuses on the three intellectuals who have considerably influenced the development of international thinking: Slavoj Zizek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupaniid. Although Zizek is the most famous of the three, the volume focuses equally on each of the thinkers.”

44) Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia, by Jeffers Engelhardt. 2015, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press (review by Lisa Mullinger).

“Jeffers Engelhardt’s first complete book follows a series of articles on his research of the sonic world of Orthodox Christianity and music in Estonian culture and society. Singing the Right Way combines ethnological fieldwork and historical research with visual and audio aids to create an informative read. Accompanying this text is a companion website, via Oxford University Press, with live audio recordings from his fieldwork in Estonia. Access to these musical examples greatly enriches the comprehension of his technical and stylistic descriptions of the choral singing performed by the various groups.”

45) Ot tsentral'nogo k tsifrovomu: Televidenie v Rossii, Vlad Strukov and Vera Zvereva, eds. 2014, Voronezh: Voronezhskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet (review by Ellina Sattarova).

“This collection of articles undertakes the daunting task of investigating the cultural and social impact of the digitalization of Russian television. The switchover, originally scheduled for 2015, is far from being completed and, for this reason alone, presents a challenge for research. While editors Vlad Strukov and Vera Zvereva admit in their introduction the difficulties of studying a medium in constant flux, they attempt to overcome them by positing what they call “a dynamic approach” (xxxi)—an attempt to tackle the complexity of the subject matter by launching a number of case studies, each with its own focus and methodology. The resulting volume initiates an important discussion on a sociocultural phenomenon that has otherwise been largely understudied.”

Slavic and East European Journal Vol 60, Issue 3

46) French and Russian in Imperial Russia. Volume 1: Language Use among the Russian Elite, Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, eds. Russian Language and Society Series. 2015, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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French and Russian in Imperial Russia. Volume 2: Language Attitudes and Identity,Derek Offord, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Vladislav Rjéoutski, and Gesine Argent, eds. Russian Language and Society Series. 2015, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (review by Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour).

“The two volumes that make up French and Russian in Imperial Russia examine language use and language attitudes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia, focusing on the period from the “Enlightenment” through the Age of Pushkin. Volume I is subtitled “Language Use among the Russian Elite” and the second is “Language Attitudes and Identity.” The books have their origin in two events that took place in the summer of 2012: a symposium on Enlightenment Russia at the University of Edinburgh and a conference on “The French Language in Russia” at the University of Bristol. The volumes include a selection of papers from these conferences, considerably edited, in some cases augmented, and in all cases, formally standardized. Several chapters were written specially for these volumes (including those on Pushkin, on Russian comedy, and on the debate between Karamzin and Shishkov). Introductions and concluding chapters were also added. According to the editors, while the volumes are conceived as complementary to one another, their focus is different and each is intended to be capable of standing on its own.”

47) Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris, by Maria Rubins. 2015, London: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Luke Franklin).

“Rubins’s comparative readings and emphasis on the emergent diasporic literature that has put such pressure on the mythos of national canons and her engagement with authors from D. H. Lawrence to Comte de Lautréamont serve to enrich the work and broaden its appeal. Scholars of comparative literature or the French and Anglo-American literature of the interwar period will benefit from this work as much as will Russian literature specialists. Nabokov scholars will also find considerable comparative context and discussion of some of the literary debates ongoing in the émigré journals. There is little in the way of introductory biographical material on the authors, but the analysis through multiple perspectives combines to give a full feeling for the writers and their milieu.”

48) South African Literature’s Russian Soul: Narrative Forms of Global Isolation, by Jeanne-Marie Jackson. 2015, New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic (review by Jill Martiniuk).

“Jeanne-Marie Jackson’s comparative study of South African and Russian writing offers a rich examination of the interplay between politics and literature. With this ambitious project Jackson seeks to push back against familiar assumptions about South African literature and its place beyond post-colonial studies and to show how the two literary traditions pair together on complex levels.”

49) Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature, by Meghan Vicks. 2015, New York: Bloomsbury Academic (review by Rebecca Stakun).

“Meghan Vicks has produced an engaging analysis of the relationship of “nothing” to narrative in the works of Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin, with additional examples from Gogol and Melville. The author comes to the conclusion that nothingness is essential to the creation of narrative, as it cannot be uncoupled from language, meaning, or even existence (171–72). Vicks takes up a complicated subject and presents her arguments well in her study.”

50) The Poetics of Early Russian Literature, by D. S. Likhachev. Ed. and trans. Christopher M. ArdenClose. Introduction, Milena Rozhdestvenskaya. 2014, Lanham: Lexington Books (review by Julia Verkholantsev).

“In the year 2016, writing about D. S. Likhachev’s The Poetics of Early Russian Literature (first published in 1967) and its place in the history of scholarship in one thousand words is almost as unachievable as retelling the contents of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. This book is an institution, now made available to the Anglophone readership in a fluent and competent translation by Christopher M. Arden-Close. Few academic works enjoy such a revered status as this classic text, and, in her introduction to this volume, Professor Milena Rozhdestvenskaya of St. Petersburg State University and Pushkin House convincingly explains why.”

51) Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle: The Twilight of Realism, Katherine Bowers and Ani Kokobobo, eds. 2015, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (review by Frederick H. White).

“One might hazard a guess that a book proposal for a collection of essays on nineteenth-century Realist literature was repackaged as something that would interest an acquisitions editor—Russian writers and the first strains of the degenerate “fin-de-siècle malaise.” One can only speculate on what happened in the process between book proposal and final submission. Regrettably, the misaligned temporal and conceptual framework detracts from these particular essays, which might be more intriguing in their rightful domain. I do not doubt that scholars of Russian Realism will find many of the chapters in this collection useful and relevant. Unfortunately, scholars of degeneration and decadence probably will not.”

52) A New Poetics of Chekhov’s Plays: Presence through Absence, by Harai Golomb. 2014, Brighton/ Eastbourne, UK: Sussex Academic Press (review by Jerome H. Katsell).

“Nothing less than an explication de texte on steroids, Harai Golomb’s A New Poetics of Chekhov’s Plays: Presence through Absence bids fair to be among the very best studies ever of Chekhov’s major dramas. Specialists in theater studies and comparative literature as well as chekhovedy from Berkeley to Moscow have hailed the innovative approaches and depth of insight displayed here by Golomb. A steady stream of superlatives has greeted this book: Jackson: “A unique and extraordinary accomplishment” (ii); Kataev: “This book is bound to revolutionize the field [...]”; McLean: “a major contribution, not only to Chekhov studies, including both drama and short stories, but to literary studies generally” (iii); Popkin: “No one reads Chekhov’s drama better” (iv)... Golomb’s Presence through Absence is undoubtedly a landmark study of Chekhov’s dramaturgy and poetics. It deserves a place of honor on the shelves of any library where Chekhov is to be found, and should be carefully read, and re-read by all those with an abiding interest in Russia’s greatest dramatist.”

53) Slavica Occitania, Catherine Géry and Hélène Mélat, eds. Vol. 38: Le littéraire et le visuel dans la culture russe des XXe et XXIe siècles. 2014, Toulouse, France: Laboratoire “Lettres, Langages et Arts” (LLA-CREATIS), Université de Toulouse (review by Elizabeth K. Beaujour).

“Slavica Occitania is a twice-yearly publication of the group Lettres, Languages et Arts (LLACRETIS) at the University of Toulouse. Since 1995, they have published 38 issues on a wide array of topics and under a variety of editors. All of these are indexed in the volume under review. Numbers 1 and 3–37

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 15 H-Soyuz are available online at w3.slavica-occitania.univ-tlse2.fr. On the journal’s website, the editors declare that the review’s orientation is both comparative and multi-disciplinary. The volumes are thematically organized and “address the relations of the Slavic world with the rest of the planet, in order to highlight the specific contributions of the former, by offering contrasting perspectives and points of view” (my translation, EKB).”

54) Antologiia PO, tom 2, Zhurnal POetov, 2009–2011, Konstantin Kedrov, Margarita Al', Elena Katsiuba, eds. 2015, Moskva: Izd. DOOS (review by Gerald Janecek).

“The second volume of this anthology duplicates in facsimile Nos. 21–33 of the previously published Moscow Zhurnal POetov for the years 2009–2011. The journal was founded in 1995 by DOOS (Dobrovol'noe obshchestvo okhrany strekoz (The volunteer society for the protection of dragonflies)), which was formed by the editors. The first volume, Antologiia zhurnala POetov, appeared in 2007 and that volume reprinted Nos. 1–20 for the years 1995–2006. According to the introduction, the first volume was intended to be used by college students. Although the journal is edited by the founders of the late- and post-Soviet Metametaphorist orientation (roughly neoSymbolist in orientation and often contrasted with Moscow Conceptualism), its selections cover a very broad spectrum of mainly innovative orientations and styles of contemporary Russian poetry. As distinct from most other poetry journals of the period, however, Zhurnal POetov has a greater focus on the visual and, beginning with the 2011 issues (Nos. 23–33), is printed in full color throughout, as is true of the individual issues as well. In fact, the two anthologies provide complete facsimile duplicates of the issues, with the addition only of very brief front matter (preface, introduction and index of authors) and end matter (design and illustration credits). In other words, if you have the anthologies, you have a complete run of the journal.”

55) Polish Literature in Transformation,Ursula Phillips (with the assistance of Knut Andreas Grimstad and Kris Van Heuckelom), ed. 2013, Zürich: Lit Verlag (review by Tamara Trojanowska).

“Ursula Phillips’s Polish Literature in Transformation, a collection of seventeen essays by both established and up-and-coming European scholars, is an engaging and useful publication. Its focus on post-1989 Polish literature reflects a growing interest among European and North American readers in the post-Communist, post-transformational cultural trajectories of former Eastern Bloc countries. Both this interest and focus are justified, since the changes that took place throughout the region have often diverted from initial expectations and predictions arising from the 1989 tectonic, historical, and economic shift. The volume’s well-written, informative, and mindful “Introduction” rightly reinforces the view that the year was not a watershed moment for cultural change, although it remains a useful marker in an overview of the process, in this case—through a literary lens.”

56) The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939–1945, by Rachel Feldhay Brenner. 2014, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (review by Emily D. Johnson).

“This monograph provides a compelling account of the diverse ways in which Polish Christian writers responded to the Holocaust in their writing both during and after World War II. Brenner divides her book into five principal chapters, each of which focuses on one of the five Warsaw writers who is known to have kept a diary during all, or part, of the War. Brenner’s subjects include Jarosław

Iwaszkiewicz, who was posthumously awarded the medal of the Righteous Among the Nations for hiding Jewish colleagues on his estate; Maria Dąbrowska, who embraced the “nationalistic-romantic ideology of Polish special destiny” and minimized the suffering of Poland’s Jews in her writing both during and after the Holocaust; Aurelia Wyleżyńska, who selflessly helped Jews during the War and was shot on the first day of the Warsaw uprising; Zofia Nałkowska, who wrote a ground-breaking early account of war-time atrocities (Medallions, 1946) and strongly identified with the plight of Poland’s Jews; and Stanisław Rembek, who often expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in his private writing, including his wartime journals, but who populated his fiction, both before and after the War, with positive Jewish characters (45).”

57) Taking Liberties: Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989,by Halina Filipowicz. Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. 2014, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press (review by Daniel W. Pratt).

“Filipowicz employs a historical approach to the subject matter, bringing non-canonical but contemporaneously popular texts that transgressed standard gender values, in terms of masculinity, femininity, class, and religion, into her analysis. Instead of concentrating on the obvious examples, she endeavors “to find room for the ignored spinster aunts and odd bachelor uncles” of the Polish dramatic family (5). By examining texts that went against the grain of contemporary values, Filipowicz illuminates the broader discussions of the day about what it meant to be a patriotic Pole, emphasizing inclusive definitions based on values, instead of exclusive definitions based on ethnicity, religion, or gender.”

58) The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin, by Ala Zuskin Perelman. Trans. Sharon Blass. Series: Judaic Traditions in Literature, Music, and Art. 2015, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press (review by Brendan Kiernan).

“This book will interest not only biographers and specialists on Jewish, Soviet, and world culture, but, more generally, historians and political scientists, and, of course, anyone interested in theater and the art and craft of acting. Part Two of the book includes an autobiographical chapter focused on acting for stage and screen, Curriculum Vitae, written by Benjamin Zuskin, as well as another chapter that reproduces some of his private correspondence (unfortunately, most of the actor’s personal and professional papers were burned by the secret police after his arrest). The Travels of Benjamin Zuskin is marvelously crafted, beautifully bound, and includes 40 well-captioned period photographs that bring Zuskin and many of the characters he created to life.”

59) Red Star Tales: A Century of Russian and Soviet Science Fiction, Yvonne Howell, ed. Various translators. 2015, Montpelier, VT: Russian Life Books (review by Jonathan Stone).

“This is an impressive and ambitious anthology that reflects an admirably high quality of editorial skill and translator acumen. It is a clear marriage of pleasure and academic rigor as practiced by an estimable group of scholars and translators. It builds upon and complements the significant series of articles on early Soviet and post-Soviet science fiction organized by Howell and Sibelan Forrester (Slavic Review, Summer 2013). The eighteen stories included in Red Star Tales (by sixteen authors) are rendered in new and extremely readable translations. The short biographies of the authors (as well as of the translators—one of the volume’s many thoughtful touches) demonstrate the temporal,

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 17 H-Soyuz ideological, and aesthetic diversity of the book’s scope. Red Star Tales excels in offering a comprehensive and wide-ranging approach to Russian science fiction (which also makes its primary failing in diversity all the more surprising: just one of the eighteen stories was written by a woman). This book’s century (1892–1992) witnessed a mindboggling array of political and technological upheavals. The story of these changes is palpably conveyed by these “red star tales.””

60) Harlequin’s Millions, by Bohumil Hrabal. Trans. Stacey Knecht. 2014, Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books (review by Mila Saskova-Pierce).

“The author’s narrative is presented through a stream of long sentences, sometimes covering nearly a full page. The translation by Stacey Knecht into English is excellent, as she renders Hrabal’s prose in idiomatic English that has a feel of authenticity, yet she preserves the length of sentences as often and as effectively as she can. The “Czechness” of Hrabal’s sentences sounds organic in this translation, not a small achievement in English. She also conveys the subtle humor of the Czech original. Her translation has unintended twists. For example, it takes some time for the reader of the English translation to recognize the gender of the narrator; in Czech, of course, the past tense reveals her gender from the very first page. This book is another of Hrabal’s stories to be enjoyed by all readers, even those who do not know Czech.”

61) The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989, Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray, eds. 2014, London: Wallflower Press (review by Masha Shpolberg).

“Edited by Kamila Kuc and Michael O’Pray, The Struggle for Form: Perspectives on Polish Avant- Garde Film 1916–1989 offers seven scholarly essays by Polish and British film scholars together with a carefully curated selection of primary sources. Books on Polish cinema have been appearing with increasing rapidity since the early 2000s, thanks in part to efforts by the Polish National Audiovisual Institute to render the films and the archives more accessible and in part to Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004. These accounts, however, have with few exceptions focused exclusively on narrative feature films. Where documentaries or short films have been addressed, it has usually been in the context of a monograph on the oeuvre of a single director, such as Krzysztof Kieślowski or Roman Polański.”

62) Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations, by Joshua Malitsky. 2013, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (review by Michael Kunichika).

“A work of comparative cinema studies, the volume under review provides an account of the role nonfiction film played in visualizing the revolutionary periods of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and Cuba in the 1960s. Its originality lies in this comparative approach, engaging these related, but distinct historical moments. While the book review editor of SEEJ asked me to review the book’s Soviet chapters, readers may find interest in its comparative approach and aim to historicize and theorize these cases of documentary production.”

63) Two Fates. Vysotsky in English: Volume II. By Vadim Astrakhan and Yuri Naumov. CD.

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Wolfhunt. Vystosky in English: Volume III. By Vadim Astrakhan. CD. (review by Thomas J. Garza).

“While both albums include songs whose lyrics do not always convey the essential meaning of the original texts, or whose musical arrangements are innovative but sometimes inappropriate, Two Fates and Wolfhunt represent a rare and impressive effort to bring the works and world of Vladimir Vysotsky to an English-speaking audience. From initiates to the world of the Russian singer- songwriter, to seasoned fans of the bard’s lyrics and music, listeners of Astrakhan’s works will gain additional understanding from his varied and energetic translations and performances of some of the most recognizable songs of the Soviet era.”

64) Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, by Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover. Second edition. Trans. Slobodanka M. Vladiv- Glover. 2015, Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books (review by Natalia Vygovskaia).

“Authors of this volume are well-known specialists in Russian literature and culture. Mikhail Epstein is a leading theoretician of post-Modernist culture in Russia, and his manifestos of Russian Postmodernism first published in 1983–1987 illustrate it brilliantly. The reader will be happy to find more than ten of these historically valuable pieces in the given collection. Central to them are themes of Moscow conceptualism, post-Modernist poetics, Russian religion, philosophy, Communist ideology, and tradition. Alexander A. Genis is a famous Russian-American writer, literary critic, and radio personality. He has written multiple books and essays about Soviet, post-Soviet, and immigrant literary and cultural studies. Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover is a renowned expert on Dostoevsky.”

65) Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Barbara Cassin, ed. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathaniel Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Translation ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. 2014, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (review by Matthew Walker).

“Philosophy may well begin in wonder, as Socrates pronounces in Plato’s Theaetetus, but if it does anything more than stand there gaping, it does so in language—or rather, languages. This, in so many words, is one way of beginning to describe the basic premise behind Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon—“a massive translation exercise with encyclopedic reach” (vii)—which is itself an English translation of a work that first appeared in French in 2004, Vocabulaire europeén des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisables, under the direction of Barbara Cassin, a French specialist of ancient Greek philosophy. Containing some 400 entries written by more than 150 scholars on philosophical and political terms drawn from at least a dozen different European and Semitic languages (including Hebrew and Arabic), at first glance this looks and feels like an academic reference work, but upon closer inspection one finds that it is much more than that.”

66) Doing Gender—Doing the Balkans: Dynamics and Persistence of Gender Relations in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States, Roswitha Kersten-Pejanić, Simone Rajlić and Christian Voß, eds. Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe. Vol. 20. 2012, München: Verlag Otto Sagner (review by K. E. von Wittelsbach).

“Doing Gender—Doing the Balkans is another excellent volume in the groundbreaking Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe series. This collection of fifteen essays by

Citation: Jennifer Carroll. December 2016 Book Review Round Up -- Part Two!. H-Soyuz. 01-07-2017. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11423/discussions/159764/december-2016-book-review-round-part-two Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 19 H-Soyuz scholars from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Albania, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and the United States is marked by a variety of approaches and infused with an interdisciplinary spirit transcending mere juxtaposition of research from different fields of Balkan Studies. Its originality lies in simultaneously questioning the dichotomy of geo-politics (Europe versus the Balkans) and gender, and proposing a subtler scale of hybrid research categories and principles. The volume will appeal to linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, gender-studies scholars and jurists examining relationships between gender, identity and power in former Yugoslavia (and, to a lesser extent, Albania), but also to general readers interested in the region.”

67) Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, ed. 2013, Brooklyn, NY: Berghahn Books (review by Emily D. Johnson).

“This edited volume, which looks at leisure activities and tourism in Eastern Europe during the Socialist period, includes an admirably diverse range of contributions in terms of both geography and themes. Chapters consider early Cold War music festivals in East Germany and Poland (David G. Tompkins), the way in which castles and chateaux were exhibited to the public in Czechoslovakia prior to 1960 (Cathleen Giustino), Poland’s efforts to transform newly incorporated Western borderlands into a wilderness tourism zone (Patrice Dabrowski), East German camps for young pioneers (Catherine J. Plum), a notorious Romanian nudist beach (Irina Costache), tourist marketing campaigns and infrastructure in Bulgaria (Mary Neuburger), hitchhiking in Poland (Mark Keck- Szajbel), Budapest’s nightlife (Alexander Vari), East Germany motorcycle races (Caroline Fricke), and Romanian soccer matches and stadiums (Florin Poenaru).”

68) A Memoir of the Missile Age: One Man’s Journey, by Vitaly Leonidovich Katayev. 2014, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press (review by Marya Zeigler).

“Vitaly Kataev’s lively memoir describes the author’s activity as a prominent rocket designer in the 1950s and 60s, his transfer to the defense department of the Central Committee in the 1970s, and his work in the 1980s in reducing the Soviet nuclear arsenal. His granddaughter, Ksenia Kostrova, compiled the book using her grandfather’s memoir, written shortly before his death in 2001, his archives, and his interview for the joint oral history project of Moscow and Stanford universities. It was translated into English by four different people so skillfully that it does not read like a translation. It is divided into two parts, Part I: Snapshots from a Career in Soviet Rocket Design, containing six chapters, and Part II: An Insider’s View of Soviet Arms Development and Limitation, with only four chapters.”

69) 1983: A Dialectical Novel, by Anthony Saidy. 2013, Baltimore, MD: Seagull Press (review by Rade Zinaić).

Anthony Saidy, renowned chess master and mentor of the iconic Bobby Fischer, has written a piece of counterfactual Cold War fiction in the realist vein of Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? An American whose successful chess career allowed him to tour the Soviet Union, Saidy conceived 1983 during the height of the Brezhnev era after serious study of Soviet history and theory and having acquired an ethnographer’s familiarity with its diverse peoples. Set in the 1980s during a hypothetical war between the Soviet Union and Communist China, 1983 traces the political

70) Russian Nominal Semantics and Morphology, Jens Nørgård-Sørensen. 2011, Bloomington, IN: Slavica (review by Wayles Browne).

“The Copenhagen Slavist Jens Nørgård-Sørensen died of heart failure on August 7, 2015, much regretted by colleagues in Denmark, Scandinavia (he was editor of Scando-Slavica), Europe, and the Slavic world, and by longstanding contacts in North America. The book under review is one of his two last major works (the other, co-authored with Lars Heltoft and Lene Schøsler, is Connecting Grammaticalisation, 2011, which considers how paradigms can join into larger paradigms). Russian Nominal Semantics and Morphology is a Structuralist study in the best sense of the term. It finds paradigms or subsystems on many levels of the Russian language and investigates the oppositions or distinctive features that keep one member of a paradigm apart from the other(s).”

71) Lithuanian Root List, Cynthia M. Vakareliyska. 2015, Bloomington, IN: Slavica (review by Mark J. Elson).

“Books of this type, which are compendia of data formerly unavailable, for all practical purposes, to the academic community, are always welcome for the convenience they provide to those with an interest in the corpus. Vakareliyska’s contribution is no exception, being the first dictionary of Lithuanian roots (i.e., lexical morphemes), prefixes, and derivational suffixes with English glosses, and also including an appendix of relevant terms as well as a list of references. The book, modeled in its format on Charles Gribble’s Russian Root List (Slavica, 1991), will be valuable to Baltists, of course, but it will be just as valuable to Slavists and Indo-Europeanists.”

72) The Expression of Predicate Possession. A Comparative Study of Belarusian and Lithuanian, by Lidia Federica Mazzitelli. Studia Typologica, Vol. 18. 2015, Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton (review by Andrii Danylenko).

“The book under review is concerned with the possessive predicative constructions in Belarusian and Lithuanian which, since Aleksandr Isačenko, have been viewed as transitional between the West European have-languages and the be-languages spoken in North-Eastern Europe (1–2). Premised on extensive cross-linguistic research, including the material excerpted from two corpora, a Belarusian and a Lithuanian one, the Internet, and several questionnaires, the author elaborates on the typological model proposed by Bernd Heine, according to whom all possible possessive constructions are derived from what he labeled source schemas (3). The main objective of the book is, therefore, found in determining which one(s) of the source schemas Belarusian and Lithuanian have chosen as the source of their possessive constructions (3).”

East European Jewish Affairs Vol 46 Issue 2

73) YIVO and the making of modern Jewish culture: scholarship for the Yiddish nation, by Cecile Esther Kuznitz. 2014, New York: Cambridge University Press (review by Jack Jacobs).

“Cecile Kuznitz’s work is an important book on an important subject. YIVO, known today as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, shaped the study of East European Jewish affairs (though not necessarily the work of East European Jewish Affairs), and today holds major collections of books and archival materials likely to be familiar to many regular readers of this journal. It is particularly well known for its work on matters relating to Yiddish language and culture and to the history of Jews in Eastern Europe. It has nurtured several generations of scholars, sponsored landmark conferences, undertaken major research projects, and published key books and periodicals. More generally, YIVO became, shortly after its creation, the most important and respected scholarly institution focused on Yiddish and on the lives of Yiddish-speaking Jewry. YIVO has, however, hitherto not been the focus of a first-rate, full-scale scholarly study.”

74) Origins of Yiddish Dialiects, by Alexander Beider. 2015, Oxford: Oxford University Press (review by Isaac L. Bleaman).

“Alexander Beider’s hefty volume contributes to this debate by reassessing the age of Yiddish and disputing the existence of “Proto-Yiddish,” the language Weinreich reconstructed as the hypothetical ancestor of all modern varieties of Yiddish. Beider proposes that Yiddish had no major systematic differences from non-Jewish varieties of German prior to the fifteenth century, and thus cannot be considered a distinct language until then. He also argues that the two primary dialects of modern Yiddish, Western Yiddish (WY) and Eastern Yiddish (EY), are not derived from a single “proto” language at all. Instead, they are derived from two distinct Germanic sources – the East Franconian and Bohemian German dialects, respectively.”

75) The international Jewish labor bund after 1945: Toward a global history, by David Slucki. 2012, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press (review by Roni Gechtman).

“David Slucki’s The International Jewish Labour Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History is a welcome addition to the historiography of the Jewish labor movement. The overwhelming majority of the existing studies of the Jewish Labor Bund have so far focused on the movement’s early years in Eastern Europe: the “Russian Period,” i.e. from the Bund’s origins in the 1890s to its dissolution in the Soviet Union during the Russian Civil War (1918–21); the “Polish” period, when the Bund flourished in interwar Poland; and the Second World War, the Holocaust, and their immediate aftermath.1 Even the Bund’s “official” history, published in five volumes by its survivors in New York between 1960 and 1981, only covers the period to 1932.2 Slucki, on the other hand, surveys virtually uncharted territories; his history starts in 1945, the approximate date of the Bund’s death certificate for pretty much everybody else. In writing a history that starts in 1945 – and even more so a global history – Slucki’s most obvious claim is that the Bund did not disappear as a movement with the almost complete annihilation of the Jewish community in Poland during the Holocaust, but rather continued to exist outside Poland, where Bundists established a network of active cultural, social, and political organizations.”

76) Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture After the Holocaust, by Jan Schwarz. 2015, Detroit: Wayne State University Press (review by David Slucki).

“Jan Schwarz frames his moving new study in terms of its contribution to Yiddish studies and Holocaust studies, yet the questions he raises are pertinent even more broadly for Jews after World

War II. At the heart of this book is the question: What happened to Jewish culture in the aftermath of destruction? How did Jews reconfigure their Jewishness after the Holocaust? How did the survivors and refugees fit into the new societies to which they were thrust? How did the Holocaust shape how Jews already settled in the United States and elsewhere imagined their place in those societies?”

77) Yiddish in Weimar Berlin: at the crossroads of diaspora politics and culture, Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov, eds. 2010, London: Legenda (review by Steven Schouten).

“This outstanding volume, published six years ago, merits a warm and positive review. It brings together researchers from England, Scotland, Germany, and the United States around the subject of the history of East European Yiddish cultural activity in Weimar Berlin. Besides an insightful introduction by Gennady Estraikh, the volume contains thirteen splendid chapters by (in alphabetic order) Amy Blau, Marc Caplan, Verena Dohrn, Gennady Estraikh, Jordan Finkin, Elvira Grözinger, Sabine Koller, Mikhail Krutikov, Shachar Pinsker, Anne-Christin Sass, Jonathan Skolnik, Barry Trachtenberg, and Heather Valencia. The chapters are mostly about the lives and work of East European Jewish intellectuals – for example Leyb Kvitko (1890–1952), Avrom Nokhem Stencl (1897–1983), and David Eynhorn (1886–1973) – who, for longer or shorter periods, resided in the German capital during the Weimar period (1918–33).”

78) L'Œuvre de secours aux enfants et les populations juives au XXe siècle: Prévenir et guérir dans un siècle de violence [The children's aid society and the Jews during the twentieth century: prevention and recovery in a century of violence], Laura Hobson Faure, Mathias Gardet, Katy Hazan, and Catherine Nicault, eds. 2014, Paris: Armand Colin (review by Erin Corber).

“This collection of essays published to commemorate the centenary of one of the most active and innovative transnational Jewish organizations in modern history is a welcome contribution to the field of global and transnational Jewish studies. This study reveals new geographies of Western European and French Jewish internationalism beyond the better-known example of the AIU in the Mediterranean world. Yet this story also highlights the degree to which Eastern European Jewish experiences shaped and were shaped by general developments in multiple global “host” societies. While the East European Jewish story tends to be dominated by narratives of refugee trauma, antisemitism, and, over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, persecution, the history of OZE makes a case for rethinking Jewish responses to these crises.”

79) Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the outsiders of Montparnasse, by Stanley Meisler. 2015, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (review by Richard Sonn).

“This book is a biography of Soutine that tries to place him in the generation of immigrant Jews who came to Paris around the time of the First World War determined to pursue an artistic career. To do so, the author includes much shorter biographical portraits of the other major Jewish artists of the era, including Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jules Pascin. He argues that Soutine is better known and respected in France than in the United States, and that, while his fame and popularity with the public lag behind those of Chagall and Modigliani, he was considered to be the most significant painter of all the immigrant artists.”