the period and provides convincing arguments for her premise that, in fact, varying notions of literary norms were in competition in Soviet literary history of the period. The reason for looking to the 1950s is still relevant in discussing the 1970s and 1980s; however the scholarly contribution of this study would have been greatly enhanced had the author incorporated, or referred to, more contemporary studies of authorship.

Mary Beth Rhiel and Alleksandra Fleszar University of New Hampshire

Joanna Hubbs. Mother : The Feminine Myth in . Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988. xvii, 302 pp. $29.95.

Of all the myths associated with the Russian land and psyche, that of Mother Russia has been, perhaps, the most preponderant. Many of Russia's nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and thinkers, in particular Dostoevskii and Berdiaev, paid homage to the myth and helped perpetuate it among Russians and Westerners who sought to unlock the mysteries of the Slavic soul. Joanna Hubbs in her important and eloquently written book Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture is the first to trace the origins of this myth systematically and to show how it has shaped many of the beliefs which lie at the heart of Russia's social, political, and cultural life. Hubbs' book is divided into two parts. The first examines the myth of divine maternity; the second the male response to it which resulted in the clash of the peasants' essentially feminine mythology with the masculine world view of the tsars. Hubbs shows in Part I how early archaic feminine authority found among the early Slavic tribes was by the eleventh century appropriated by the ruling male elite, thus forcing the cult of the Mother Goddess to move underground away from the center of political life where it entered the domain of peasant women. Hubbs attributes the worship of such mythological creatures as the , the , the sirin, and Baba Iagato the desire on the part of Russian peasant women to assert their superiority over the male political domain both by creating a panoply of female goddesses to worship and by serving as their priestesses. In examining the fate of the worship of Mother Earth in newly Christianized Russia, Hubbs makes the point that the image of the Mother of God, introduced by the Church to appease the female sector of the population which actively resisted this new patriarchal religion, never fully replaced the cult of the earlier fem ale deities. Along side the worship of the bogoroditsa or Mother of God, the figure of Paraskeva-Piatnitsa, who represented in one the Moist Mother Earth, Baba laga, and the rusalki, continued to be venerated. If Mary was worshiped by both men and women, Paraskeva-Piatnitsa remained a goddess solely of the female domain. In the second part of her book Hubbs examines the clash that ensued as a male dominated political and religious hierarchy came into conflict with older feminine forces. She shows how, for example, in the folk tale and epic, both of which were originally dominated by strong female figures, the hero, in order to be an effective member of the political and social community, had to absorb within himself feminine power. Hubbs shows how the fortunes of heroes such as Dobrynia and Il'ia Muromets depend, in the early Kievan cycles of byliny, on returning to Mother Moist Earth from whom they receive succor and strength. Hubbs sees the absence of the father figure in early epic and his appearance only later in the history of this genre as reflective of a political process in which a male dominated autocracy gradually took over the reins of state power, exerting its authority over both the land and the family structure. Increasingly the ideology of the people who worshiped the land in its feminine incarnation came to be at odds with a patriarchal state imposing its will