Schopenhauer and Kant (the chronology here is difficult), and with his personal friend Strakhov are all examined at some length and with acumen. The argument is that l�OISIUi first sought his great synthesis in nature, understood as "everything outside the human soul that was made by God and not by man" (p. 50) and including both reason and morality. This is expressed in "Lucerne," whose ending is not nihilistic but reflects a Goethean view of nature as inclusive of opposites. The 1860s are represented by "The Cossacks" and War and Peace. The former is not a simple contrast of nature with civiiization, since the Cossacks are at a stage between the two, while C3fenin shows traces of "higher reason" as, in the stag's lair, he reasons his way to self-abnegation. Orwin's approach to War and Peace follows frequently argued and accepted lines but fills in some new details: history is seen as 'the natural direction taken by life" (p. 106), and nature includes Goethean opposites such as war and peace, as well as morality; man ac - cepts and self-consciously fits himself into this scheme of things, so that Prince Andrei, for ex- ample, "evolved into a man of nature, who seeks and most loves the natural ideal of reason or law in and of itself' (p. 129). By the time of Anna Karenina Tolstoi, while rejecting Schopen- hauer's metaphysical pessimism, had learnt that nature is "submoral" (p. 202) and far from a source of moral goodness, which Tolstoi now begins to seek in the tradition of peasant culture. At the same time his reading of Strakhov and the scientists caused him to abandon the view of people as atomic individuals. Anna Karenina still depends on a metaphysical and moral "synthesis that gives shape and meaning to the details of the life of the individual and of mankind" (p. 204); but, in contrast to the epic War and Peace in which personal happiness and morality are linked, it is a drama in which they are in tension. And this tension only in creased in Tolstoi's later life as he continued to search for a philosophically satisfying elaboration of an absolute standard of good" (p. 168). Unfortunately, the standards of editing at the Princeton University Press have permitted a distracting number of misprints and solecisms to remain in the text. By what appears to be an unhappy retroversion the Otechestvennye zapiski appear on page 1 18 as the Zapiski otech- estva. And on page 172 Orwin reproduces the erroneous notion that has Stiva Oblonskii quote from Die Fledermaus. In the list of "Works Cited" it is rather disconcerting, in a book that dis- cusses at length people like Rousseau, Goethe and Schopenhauer, to find no originals by them, no secondary studies written in their languages, nor modern studies of the early Tolstoi such as that by Eberhard Dieckmann. I missed also any reference to John Hagan's sensible and sensi- tive studies of Tolstoi. These are, however, minor matters that serve to set some limits to what is basically an erudite and intelligent inquiry into one of the world's most fascinating minds.

C.J.G. Turner University of British Columbia

Amy Mandelker. Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993. xvi, 241 pp. $39.50.

Amy Mandelker's study of Anna Karenina sets as its goal the challenging of a number of traditional views about Lev Tolstoi's life and work, notably that he was a misogynist and that his life and work fall neatly into two distinct periods, pre- and post-conversion. True, this is one of a number of studies that may be said to be a backlash to the backlash. First, the myth of Tolstoi as a noble prophet was challenged by feminists and others who trotted out quotations from his letters, incidents from his life, and episodes from his works to demonstrate a "de- monic" Tolstoi. Then in turn this myth was challenged by many scholars and critics who showed that T olstoi's life and works needed to be understood in a larger context. Perhaps the most extended and successful treatment of Toistoi's depiction of women is Marie Semon magisterial study, Les Femmes dans louvre de Lemon ToistoF (Paris: lnstitut d'e- tudes slavs, 1984). It is too bad that this wise and generous study, which encompasses a great deal more than an analysis of Tolstoi's heroines, is not better known among English-speaking Slavists. It is not listed in Mandelker's bibliography, although her book covers some of the same ground, and less subtly and persuasively than Semon's book. Nevertheless, Mandelker's book can be seen as a useful antidote to many misconceptions about Tolstoi that still persist in the popular (and even the scholarly) consciousness. As a monograph focused on a single work, it explores many characters and episodes of the novel in detail, provided the reader with material for rethinking his/her exegesis of the novel, either in agreement or in argument with Mandelker. Mandelker gives a good survey of positions taken by critics in interpreting the figure of Anna Karenina, particularly those by feminists, who are divided between condemning Anna for betraying her feminine role as mother, and condemning her for not taking a sufficiently active part in determining her own destiny. Mandelker wants to reinstate Anna as the clear heroine of the novel. Her argument is best summarized in this statement from the end of chapter 7: "Within the tragic and mythic tradition, Anna's death does not constitute a punishment but in- stead a liberation from her confinement in a social arena where the guest for the development of an autonomous self, emblematized as the acguisition of a shadow, represented an unforgiv- able transgression." (p. t 62) , , However, to establish this reading of Anna's character, Mandelker takes views that depart radically from the mainstream in reading two other women characters of the novel. While granting that Dolly is positively viewed by Tolstoi, Mandelker argues that overall Tai stoi under- mines her view, far from making it a moral touchstone in the novel. "Dolly's seeming heroic en- durance is thus exposed as being sustained by the same dangerous bourgeois delusions of ro- mantic love that drive Anna Karenina's passion." (p. 55) "In depicting Dolly, Tolstoy drew yet one more portrait of the victimization of woman: in this case a spiritual rather than a physical death, a life based on ties, self-deception, dissimulation, and, ultimately, on cowardice.' (p. 55) This point of view overlooks Tolstoi's ability to have his principal characters encompass many points of view, some of them antithetical to his own ideological position, while showing that these points of view are well-motivated, and even life-affirming for the particular individual. Dolly's romanticism is not held against her, but shows that something of what Tolstoi liked to call 'poetry, still remains in her. Conversely, Mandelker argues that Varenka, usually thought of as "a sterile flower," in fact offers an alternatives route for the heroine. "Varenka's single state, her conviction that there are 'so many more important things' than love and marriage, and her con- tinual attention to others' needs prefigure the idealized single women of Tolstoy's post-conver- sion writings," (p. 178) Such an argument overlooks the fact that these very qualities of Varenka have already been tested in the Baden episode and been found wanting. Whether or not Varenka did the best thing in refusing Koznyshev's proposal (and perhaps she did), the fact .that neither can bring off the chance to find a life partner produces sadness in Kitty and Levin, a telling commentary on the lack of life in each of the "failed fiances.' Other themes of Mandelker's study have to do with the challenge which Tolstoi mounts, in her opinion, to both the continental novel of adultery and the Victorian novel of "domestic ac- quisition." "By beginning Anna's fall with the reading of a Victorian novel, he reverses the source of danger from the continental romance to the Victorian novel and thus locates the source of