In Anns Manufacturing. Traveling in the Caucasus in 1873. His Brother

in anns manufacturing. Traveling in the Caucasus in 1873. his brother Robert initiated Nobel involvement in petroleum by buying some land and a small refinery in Baku for 25,000 rubles. Robert's impulse, Ludwig's finawial, organizational, and technical skills (the famous brother Alfred, inventor of dynmnite, lent money and advice) led to a colos- sal enterprise with national and international ramifications. The Nobel fields, refineries, pipelines, and oil tankers (the development of which Tolf ranks with Alfred's invention of dynamite) were among the most important sectors of Russia's industrializing econo- my. The last Nobel operating in Russia, Emmanuel, was also the first Nobel to become a Russian subject: he died in emigration in 1932, having seen the Bolsheviks expropriate his holdings after the Revolution. Tolf tells the story artfully, given his narrow research base. Essentially. he has woven around his use of manuscript materials in the Landsarkiv in Lund. Sweden, and the business and family papers at the Stockholm Nobel Foundation, a variety of information gleaned from published sources, mainly in Inglish. The story is colorful and interesting, with cthnographic information on the Baku region, general conditions in the Russian oil industry, the problems of doing business under imperial bureaucratic tutelage, develop- ments in technology and the technology of warfare, the impact of the political crisis upon the oil industry. The narrowness of Tolfs study comes from, in part, weakness on the Russian side. Several errors in transliteration, together with citations from only one or two works in Russian indicate that the immense pool of material on the oil industry published in pre- Soviet and Soviet periods alike, was closed to Tolf for linguistic reasons. The work also suffers from a lack of analytical and critical depth. Some sections read like descriptions of the Nobel enterprises drawn from stock-purchasing prospectuses. In particular, the condition of Nobel workers is drawn in rosy terms. (Ronald Cirigor Suny's studies of Baku workers suggest the Nobels were not exempt from the exploitation of, for example, ethnic rivalries among oil-field laborers.) It is also nonsense to suggest that the Soviets are responsible for our ignorance about the Nobel family oil operations a theme sounded in the flyleaf blurb, in Tolfs Introduction, and in the Preface by, of all people, the late Bertram D. Wolfe. This is the stuff of old ('old-War cliches. Anyone working in the Russian area using Soviet materials knows how much is accorded the role of foreign capital, enterprise, and technology. A random check of several standard Soviet works on nineteenth-century history, economic development, and the Russian bourgeoisie turned up references to the Nobel brothers in each case. The most recent edition of the Bnl'sftaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia has an entry on the Nobel brothers and their role in the petroleum industry. To be sure, there has been no major study of the Nobels on the Soviet side. But nor has such a study turned up in the West either, where emphasis has been on Alfred and the Nobel prizes. (McKay's study does not even mention them. Perhaps he will cover the subject in his work on the Russian petroleum industry.) Tolf's account is therefore a chal- lenge to Western historians of Imperial Russia to tell us more about the Russian Rocke- fellers--and Camegies, and Vanderbilts, and Morgans. Louis Menashe Polytechnic Institute of New York Lydia M. Lotman. Afanasy Fet (Twayne World Authors 279). Trans. Margaret Wettlin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976. 180 pp. $7.95. In this book Lotman offers a new survey, in U;nglish, of let's oeuvre; his works are discussed chronologically and in relation to the events of his life. eft has received much attention recently. The U.c. scholar who is responsible for having done the bulk of substantive research and reflection on Fet, and on whom all subsequent historians are de- pendent, is Boris Bukhshtab. He brought out in 1936 the Biblioteka poeta: Bnl'shaia .seriia edition of let's collected poetry, followed by a second edition in 1959. In his in- troductory article there he provided essential biographical and textual material and re- viewed 1'et's aesthetic (the creation of beauty rather than the imitation of reality), his preferred themes (nature, love, beauty itself, often art), and his place in the history of Russian literature. In 1966 Richard Gustafson published The ImaKinatiol1 of Spring: The /'�'f/'f of Afanasy Fet in which he cast a radically Western perspective of let's work. He did so by stressing Fees art for art aesthetic and certain common poetic structures at the expense of chronology and the genres recognized by Fet (elegies, anthology verse, "melo- dies"). Yet his discussion of themes, subsumed as they are under his own categories, is not significantly at variance with Bukhshtab's, and he mentions the latter with praise. In 1971 D. D. Blagoi published a long article, "Mir kak krasota," in a new edition of het's Vechernie uXni; Blagoi also acknowledged his debt to Bukhshtab. In 1974 Bukhshtab was able to publish his own new book, A. A. Fet: Ocherk zhizn' i tvorchestva. This is a significantly enlarged version of his introduction to the Bol'shaia seriia edition; it is in no way a popularizing work and should now be considered our most authoritative work on I et. Particularly stimulating here is Bukhshtab expanded examination of Fet's rhythmic and semantic experiments, which shows that Fet was a true precursor of twentieth-century poets. Lotman's orientation is historical and circumstantial, like Bukhshtab's, rather than theoretical, like Gustafson's. with whom shc has some quarrels. Unlike Bukhshtah work, her presentation is flawed throughout by two tendencies inimical to an understanding of let. She appears not to recognize or the acknowledge Romanticism very readily. Thus she ascribes as many of let's tendencies as possible either to Classicism, apparently viewed as the predecessor of Realism, or else to Realism itself. Early in her discussion she states that let rejected the conept of art as an ideal outside of life because he saw beauty as an integral part of life, and that, if he also loved an ideal it was the Classical one, which she has identified as "harmony" (p. 33). Discussing his anthology verse, she interprets its freedom from subjectivity as a broad response to life, and therefore as Realism (p. 73). His nature poems are easily adduced as Realistic. She is also chary of impressionism. If I et's poetry has commonly been called impressionistic, she counters with the objection that his impressions are of the real world (p. I11). Her own aesthetic is baldly stated: "Art is to reality as a copy is to the object copied" (p. 110). Her second willful tendency is allied with her first: she insists on a life-affirming interpretation of 1'ct. Thus she argues that he loved nature for itself, not just as an object of art, that his female figures are strong whereas Gustafson had described them as pale (p. 98). In her final paragraph she states, "he teaches others to see the world around them and to love it -to love it because it is life itself Compare Bukhshtab's words as he draws his 1974 work to a close: " 'preo- brazhcnic tragedii, stradaniia-v krasotu i radost', "v zhazhdu bytiia" ' " (quoting F;. V. 1 rmilov).). Lotman's scholarly apparatus is also flawed. Let us leave aside such matters as her having borrowed from Bukhshtab without acknowledgment his identification of the source of one of 1 et's poems in a particular location in Schopenhauer (Bukhshtab, 1959, p. 66; Lotman, p. 113 She does not cite Fet himself when she paraphrases or even quotcs his words on his own aesthetic (pp. 59, 88, 111), surely the most sensitive topic in her book. In addition, Bukhshtab's 1974 work and Blagoi's 1971 article have both been omitted from the bibliography, for which the present editors acknowledge some responsibility. There remains ample room for substantive work on Fet. For example, no one has as yet followed up Fet's lead when he placed both Goethe and Schiller among his teachers. It is also true that all of the recent work on let has been in a laudatory mode, probably .

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