Faith Wigzell. Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender, and Divination in Russia from 1765. New York and Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xi + 250 pp. $64.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-521-58123-3. Reviewed by W. Arthur McKee Published on H-Russia (September, 1999) As a twelve-year old eccentric genius, Ivan miniature comedy of errors depended in part on a Babichev, the representative of doomed, Old series of cultural inversions. The dream replays a Regime romanticism in Yuri Olesha's 1927 satire, scene from the past rather than revealing the fu‐ Envy, purports to invent a device that can make a ture. Not only are dreams induced rather than in‐ person dream whatever its user wishes. terpreted, but the "sorcerer" is only a callow male Babichev's father, a stern classicist, asks for a apprentice rather than the usual wizened matron. dream of the Battle of Pharsalus but threatens The skeptical father nonetheless submits to the harsh punishment if the dream does not appear. dream inducer while the mother remains on the Unfortunately for Ivan, the dream comes not to sidelines, even though in many Russian house‐ the father but to a servant, who interprets the holds, as Wizgell shows, women were the most horses in the battle as a sign that her would-be f‐ avid participants in dream-magic. Only the uned‐ ance will lie to her. The father beats Ivan, the ucated servant is cast to type, and her earnest be‐ mother goes into shock, and the maid rejects her lief in the dream's divinatory nature makes her, suitor's request for her hand. A few weeks later, like her predecessors scattered throughout Rus‐ Ivan manages to convince his father that a hot-air sian belles lettres, into an object of humor for balloon fying over their hometown is actually a those enlightened enough to be in on the joke.[2] gigantic soapbubble of his, the son's, creation. Yet those who, like Ivan's father, seek to in‐ That night, the battle of Pharsalus does come to vert the normal process of dream magic, or who, the father, albeit in a disturbing vision that even more ambitious like Wizgell, seek to invert "makes fun of history" : "the battle was decided by all Russian divinatory practices by interpreting Balearic slingsmen who arrived in hot-air bal‐ the interpreters --in short, all would-be scholars of loons."[1] dreams and divination should pay heed to the For Olesha's contemporaries, as Wizgell outcome of the comedy, in which the dream makes clear in her Reading Russian Fortunes, this "makes fun of history." Unlike the future itself, H-Net Reviews how people have tried and still try to predict the 1980s, this furtive and remarkably hardy culture future may be knowable. Nonetheless, like the began to spring through the cracks. Today, as Rus‐ dreams which commonly serve as their object, sia's future becomes ever more uncertain, for‐ divinatory cultures and practices are fraught with tune-telling is enjoying a renaissance. ambiguity, and the scholar who would assay them What hampers Wizgell's ability to peer into need bring a wide range of sources and fnely- this fascinating subculture are the restricted tuned analytical tools to bear. range of materials and questions she considers. Though highly informative, Wizgell's history Having scoured Russia for these fortune-telling of Russian divinatory culture from the eighteenth books -- even Imperial depository libraries often century to the present fails to capture her sub‐ did not acquire copies -- Wizgell understandably ject's rich antinomies. Reading Russian Fortunes wanted to train her analytical spotlight on them. begins with the publication in Russia of the frst Books, however, can only tell us so much of how texts that claimed to hold the keys to the future. their readers understood and used them. Wizgell She explores the range of fortune-telling books ruefully notes the lack of direct references to for‐ that appeared in Russia thereafter, from geoman‐ tune-telling books in literary and other descrip‐ tic oracles to instructions on how to read coffee tions of everyday life, even though publishing sta‐ grounds, from cartomantic tomes to the dream‐ tistics show that divinatory texts were always big books (sonniki) that became the Russian fortune- sellers. Those references which survive are often telling genre par excellence. Narrowly focused on throw-away lines --like the quatrain in Pushkin's these texts and the "secondary" oral culture they Eugene Onegin on Tat'iana's devotion to Martyn support, she only considers pre-existing "folk" div‐ Zadeka's book of predictions-- that dismiss for‐ inatory cultures as "a context and cultural tune-telling as vulgar, feminine superstition. residue" (p. 3) and virtually ignores the arguably Clearly, these are neither revealing nor trustwor‐ parallel elite cultures of theosophy, spiritualism, thy. Though Wizgell was able to fnd some sugges‐ and the occult. She fnds that, unlike other popu‐ tive depictions, much about fortune-telling re‐ lar subcultures, which are ostensibly obsessed mains enshrouded in mystery. Wizgell attempts to with novelty, fortune-telling was remarkably sidestep this gap by giving a cursory diachronic "conservative," with readers preferring the old re‐ analysis of changes in fortune-telling books and liable interpretations and the (generally foreign) an overly ivolved description of the sages who prophets who made them (pp. 1-2 and ch. 7). supposedly wrote them. As enlightened elites became disdainful of the Wizgell refuses to make deeper forays into threat to rationality posed by divinatory books, elite culture to explain not just how fortune- she argues, fortune-telling itself became increas‐ telling books were received but how, more gener‐ ingly feminine and strategically "trivialized," a ally, fortune-telling practices and beliefs were un‐ practice of women around kitchen tables that derstood. In Wizgell's rather simplistic account, posed as a "harmless" domestic diversion. Divina‐ the cultural force of the Enlightenment, with its tory practices thus became unworthy of the effort disdain for popular irrationalism, conquers the to extirpate them, at least until 1917. The apostles imagination of Russia's intelligentsia after the of a "scientific" means of predicting the future 1830s. The occasional waves of elite interest in who seized power that year could not bear com‐ magic and the paranormal that followed are dis‐ petitors, and so they deprived divinatory culture missed out of hand as fads that quickly "faded of its texts and forced it underground. But as the from view or failed ever to attract a broader clien‐ Communist edifice began to crumble in the late tele" (p. 8). In fact, as a recently published collec‐ 2 H-Net Reviews tion on the occult in Russian culture makes clear, nation with dreams that pervades Russian litera‐ elite fascination with secret knowledge that could, ture from Pushkin onward. Not only would it be among other things, reveal the future, had deep interesting to know if dreambooks constituted an roots and influenced the arts and society through‐ unacknowledged "code" that explains the symbol‐ out the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.[3] ism in dreams in literature, but such an explo‐ The emergence and early popularity among ration might provide evidence on the degree to the elite of fortune-telling books in the mid- to which various groups believed in dream divina‐ late- eighteenth century traced by Wizgell may tion.[5] At the very least, placing dreambooks in well have been an important phase in the devel‐ the larger context of belles lettres might allow one opment of this fascination with irrationalism. to trace the development of a psychological, Once they became the common property of petty rather than premonitory, interpretation of tradesmen and provincial noblewomen, however, dreams in Russia. As it stands, Wizgell too often the fortune-telling books lost their cachet. In their assumes that interpreting dreams serves the place, spiritualist impresarios such as Madame much the same therapeutic function as it does for Blavatskaia offered more "refined" methods of those of us living in the post-Freudian West, even peering into the future to clients anxious to pre‐ though the exegeses suggested by dreambooks di‐ serve their elite status. In other words, popular rect the dreamer's attention to the outside world fortune-telling books may have served as a key rather than the inner self (see, for example, p. 50). backdrop against which newly emerging occult While Wizgell does try to place fortune-telling practices distinguished themselves. Wizgell never practices in the context of pre-existing folk for‐ considers the possibility that the fortune-telling tune-telling culture, she ties herself in knots ex‐ books played a role in a larger cultural system (al‐ plaining the early and abiding popularity of beit an elite one) and thus misses an opportunity dreambooks in Russia. Initially, she claims that to further illuminate her sources. before one can answer the question of whether or Of course, elite disciples of irrationalism were not folk oneiromancy (dream divination) paved not confined to occultists. From the early nine‐ the way for the ready acceptance of dreambooks, teenth century on, romantics insisted that the soul one has "to establish that East Slav oneiromantic could apprehend a more profound truth than that traditions were not contaminated by textual im‐ available to the senses and the intellect. Not sur‐ ports prior to the influx of translated texts" (p. 57). prisingly, such a weltanschauung lent credibility But given the lack of sources on pre-modern to fortune-telling; Pushkin, for example, read folk dream divination beliefs and practices, in or‐ dreambooks and patronized fortune-tellers (pp. der to establish this claim Wizgell falls back on 71, 140) [4].