Canadian Slavonic Papers Revue Canadienne des Slavistes ISSN: 0008-5006 (Print) 2375-2475 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcsp20 Book Reviews Alexandra Popoff, Serhy Yekelchyk, David Goldfrank, Andriy Zayarnyuk, Robert Collis, Kazimiera J. Cottam, Alla Nedashkivska, Irina Astashkevich, Maxim Tarnawsky, Max Bergholz, Brian Horowitz, Sharon A. Kowalsky, Christopher Ely, Alexander M. Martin, Ralph Lindheim, Gerald M. Easter, Gunter Schaarschmidt, Eugene Miakinkov, George Chuchman, Nadine Thielemann, George Thomas, George Cummins, Zarema Kumakhova, Céline Marangé, Christopher Burton, Vera Tolz, Megan Swift, Kevin Kain, George Soroka, Alison Rowley, Seth Graham, J.-Guy Lalande, Jan Raska, Katharine Hodgson, John Stanley, Harold Schefski, Geneviève Cloutier, Barbara Henry, Andrew Demshuk, Martina Björklund, Gerhard Schildberg-Schroth, Zina Gimpelevich, Andrew Dombrowski, N.G.O. Pereira, Lasha Tchantouridzé, Karen Gammelgaard, John Dingley, Sarah Clovis Bishop, Yuri Leving, Laurie Bernstein, Lynne Viola, Annie Gérin, Ljiljana Šarić, Tristan Landry, Victor Taki, Julia Vaingurt, Leonard Friesen, Donald J. Raleigh & M. Mark Stolarik To cite this article: Alexandra Popoff, Serhy Yekelchyk, David Goldfrank, Andriy Zayarnyuk, Robert Collis, Kazimiera J. Cottam, Alla Nedashkivska, Irina Astashkevich, Maxim Tarnawsky, Max Bergholz, Brian Horowitz, Sharon A. Kowalsky, Christopher Ely, Alexander M. Martin, Ralph Lindheim, Gerald M. Easter, Gunter Schaarschmidt, Eugene Miakinkov, George Chuchman, Nadine Thielemann, George Thomas, George Cummins, Zarema Kumakhova, Céline Marangé, Christopher Burton, Vera Tolz, Megan Swift, Kevin Kain, George Soroka, Alison Rowley, Seth Graham, J.-Guy Lalande, Jan Raska, Katharine Hodgson, John Stanley, Harold Schefski, Geneviève Cloutier, Barbara Henry, Andrew Demshuk, Martina Björklund, Gerhard Schildberg- Schroth, Zina Gimpelevich, Andrew Dombrowski, N.G.O. Pereira, Lasha Tchantouridzé, Karen Gammelgaard, John Dingley, Sarah Clovis Bishop, Yuri Leving, Laurie Bernstein, Lynne Viola, Annie Gérin, Ljiljana Šarić, Tristan Landry, Victor Taki, Julia Vaingurt, Leonard Friesen, Donald J. Raleigh & M. Mark Stolarik (2011) Book Reviews, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 53:2-4, 575-661, DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2011.11092691 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2011.11092691 Published online: 14 Apr 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 37 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcsp20 BOOK REVIEWS COMPTES RENDUS Judith E. Kalb. Russia’s Rome: Imperial Visions, Messianic Dreams, 1890–1940. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xiv, 299 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95, paper. “Russians have claimed Roman origins for centuries,” writes Judith Kalb in the first book- length study of Russian modernist writings on ancient Rome (p. 4). Russia’s self- identification with the great empire of antiquity is a cultural phenomenon, and Kalb examines “the process of identifying with, rejecting, emulating, and longing for Rome— that the Russian modernists who wrote about Rome both described and embodied” (p. 6). Russia had its stake in Rome, having received its religion and alphabet from Byzantium, the Eastern part of the Empire. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the centre of Orthodox Christendom shifted to Moscow, and the notion of Russia as Byzantium’s spiritual heir became prevalent. The concept of Moscow as the Third Rome was first formulated in the monk Filofei’s epistle to Vasilii III. “For two Romes have fallen, but the Third [i.e., Moscow] stands, and a Fourth shall not be” (p. 15). The doctrine became a political and religious symbol for the expansionist-minded Muscovite state. The first Russian monarch to adopt the title “tsar” (from the Latin caesar), Ivan III married a niece of the last Byzantine emperor and added Byzantium’s double-headed eagle to the Russian coat of arms. But because Russia missed the Renaissance and the classical period, the West considered it a backward nation. Even the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists “ran the risk of being viewed as barbarians by Western Europeans” (p. 8). As a result, “Russians sought affirmation through sometimes exaggerated claims of equality” (p. 9). Peter I, the first Russian Emperor, had modelled his new northern capital on Rome. The “Bronze Horseman” statue of Peter I, erected by Catherine II in Petersburg, emulated the bronze monument to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome. Catherine II encouraged writers to assert Rome as a model for the Russian empire. Under Nicholas II, the weakened Russian monarchy continued to promote the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome. The Eternal City lured Russia’s leading painters and writers, supplying ideas and themes. Alexander Pushkin read the Roman historian Tacitus when composing Boris Godunov. Dostoevsky’s vision of Russia’s special destiny, expressed in his 1880 Pushkin Speech, had influenced philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev to declare “that the power of Russia as the Third Rome lay in Russia’s selfless ability to synthesize East and West” (p. 17). In turn, Solov'ev’s ideas influenced the early twentieth-century writers, especially the Symbolists. Russian modernist writers explored the theme in a variety of genres—and Kalb focuses on the “underappreciated” works by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Alexander Blok, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Mikhail Kuzmin. (Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is an exception and is only briefly reviewed.) Merezhkovskii created “a Symbolist Rome” in his trilogy Christ and Anti-Christ (p. 35). His trilogy became “the blueprint” (p. 34) for other Symbolists and particularly, for Valerii Briusov who gave it “one of the first places in Russian literature” (p. 76) and who later developed the theme in his “Roman novels.” Blok’s least known work and the author’s favourite, his essay “Catiline,” laid the foundation for his famous poem “The Twelve.” His essay makes a connection between the Roman events and the 1917 Russian Revolution. Lucius Sergius Catiline, a Roman politician of the 1st century BC, who conspired to overthrow the Roman Republic and aristocratic Senate, had committed atrocities. Unlike the ancient historians and more like Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LIII, Nos. 2–3–4, June-September-December 2011 / juin-septembre-décembre 2011 576 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Ibsen who in the light of the 1848 revolutions in Europe had described Catiline as “almost Christ-like,” Blok glorifies the nobility of his goals and refers to Catiline as a “Roman Bolshevik” (p. 109). A “professedly apolitical” Mikhail Kuzmin was also inspired by Roman history to contemplate contemporary events. In 1924, soon after Lenin’s death, Kuzmin wrote the play The Death of Nero. Kuzmin’s drama is “the tale of Rome’s notorious first-century emperor Nero, clearly presented as a precursor to both Lenin and Stalin” (p. 162). In it Kuzmin’s Rome is simultaneously the capital of the Roman Empire during Nero’s lifetime and the twentieth-century setting for the literary exploits of a contemporary writer, Pavel Lukin. Kuzmin’s little-known play throws fresh light on Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita where events unfold in both the ancient and the modern worlds. “And as in Kuzmin’s work, Bulgakov’s two time periods are linked through the figure of a Russian artist, who writes during the modern period about the ancient one” (p. 188). In Kalb’s view, the contrast between the Roman Judea and the Soviet Moscow in Bulgakov’s novel “parodies the notion of Russia as a messianic Third Rome” (p. 191). Kalb examines the modernist writings to determine whether the Third Rome term has “been used to support pre-existing notions of Russian national identity, or to reflect its disappearance” (p. 197). Joseph Brodsky used it ironically when in his 1986 essay, “Flight from Byzantium,” he explained his visit to Istanbul thus: “After all, I spent thirty-two years in what is known as the Third Rome, about a year and a half in the First. Consequently, I needed the Second, if only for my collection” (p. 205). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian writers treated the Third Rome concept with darker irony than Brodsky, as in the 1991 newspaper article with the subtitle “Musings on the Ruins of an Empire.” In Victor Pelevin’s 1994 novel, The Life of Insects, two human beings in the form of insects discuss their country’s changed fortune: “Well, if we write Third Rome in Russian, Trety Rim, and then turn the word for ‘Rome’ backward, we get Trety Mir, third World” (p. 196). The term has also been used “on the level of kitsch to provide Russian flavor to a diverse variety of enterprises” (p. 198). Kalb’s examples include Yalta’s Third Rome Casino and an obscure publishing house, Third Rome, which produces automobile-related texts. Spelling of Russian names remains a frustrating area for Western scholarship, and Kalb’s impressive study is not free from occasional inconsistencies. Kalb uses the Library of Congress transliteration system and accepted anglicizations of well-known Russian names. But the spelling of such names in the study is irregular: e.g., Trotsky and Tolstoi, Brodsky and Dostoevskii. Alexandra Popoff, University of Saskatchewan Serhii Plokhy. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xx, 392 pp. Bibliography. Index. $77.00, cloth. Few collections of occasional papers possess such an internal coherence as Serhii Plokhy’s book. In part, this is due to the author’s excellent work on updating and editing older texts, as well as the lengthy introduction linking them together. On a more fundamental level, however, this is evidence of continuity in the author’s research interests. Plokhy is well known for his solid work on Cossacks and religion, as well as on the making of Ukrainian BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 577 national historiography. These themes all run through this book, although here they are more often addressed indirectly, through their later historical representations.