Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva. by AngelaLivingstoneReview by: Olga Peters HastySlavic Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 123-124Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499594 .

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Book Reviews 123

uous efforts-fortunately unsuccessful-to lure Roman Jakobson back to Russia, at the very time when the Formalists were under ominous attack and Shklovsky himself had made an abject public apology for his Formalist sins. In the second, Freidin analyzes with great discernment the many pushes and pulls, personal, professional and polit- ical, for and against emigration affecting Isaak Babel' during this period. In a sonme- what densely written but illuminating essay Vittorio Strada distills the philosophical and personal essence from Mikhail Bulgakov's major works, epitomizing it as "mag- nificent contempt" (Akhmatova's phrase) for the degenerate Soviet world he lived in. The late, much lamented Edward Brown has left us a characteristically witty and stimulating comparison of Olesha's Envy with Nabokov's The Gift. Irina Paperno, her- self the author of a brilliant study of Chernyshevsky, is uniquely qualified to analyze what Nabokov did with the Chernyshevsky theme in the same novel. Clarence Brown with succinct precision identifies in Nabokov a form of erlebte Rede in reverse, which he labels oratio nabokoviensa. In his second contribution, presenting a considerable body of fascinating new material, Lazar Fleishman examines Pasternak's ties, while he was writing Doctor Zhivago, with the English literary-philosophical group associated with Sir Herbert Read and the almanac Transformation. Ruth Rischin publishes, with an excellent, detailed commentary, interesting letters dating from the 1940s by the emigre poet Dovid Knut. George Cheron, likewise with careful commentary, publishes war- time letters from R. Ivanov-Razumnik to Nina Berberova. Also inspired by Frank's notion of "spatial form," Andrew Wachtel illuminatingly explores intertextual dia- logues with Tolstoy in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel and Vasilii Grossman's Life and Fate. John B. Dunlop details the political and journalistic infighting surrounding the publication in Russia of The Gulag Archipelago and Red Wheel. Geir Kjetsaa reviews current Russian "revisionist" perspectives on Gogol'. Finally, Ellen Chances ably ana- lyzes Dostoevskian echoes in the work of Andrei Bitov.

All Slavists will find much of interest and value in these volumes, and we should all be grateful to Joseph Frank for inspiring them.

HUGH MC LE, AN University of California, Berkeley

Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva. Trans. and Intro. Angela Livingstone. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 214 pp. Chronology. $27.95, hard bound.

The translation of writings that draw as intensely as do Tsvetaeva's on the associative potential opened by the acoustic and polysemic aspects of language is a valiant un- dertaking. Angela Livingstone has acquitted herself admirably. Although we miss Tsve- taeva's muscle tone, the English rendering of the essays reveals a good grasp of and affinity with Tsvetaeva's thought process and use of language.

The essays Livingstone has assembled in this volume span the years 1922-1934 and center on poets and poetry. They are (in her rendering): "Downpour- of Light," "The Poet on the Critic," "History of a Dedication" (in part), "The Poet and Time," "Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia," "Two Forest Kings," "Poets with History and Poets without History" (in part) and finally "Art in the Light of Conscience." The first and the last of these have appeared elsewhere but have been revised for this edition. The essay "Two Forest Kings" has also been translated by J. Marin King (Marina Tsvetaeva: A Captive Spirit, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980) but the remaining essays appear for the first time in English translation. This particular selection may appear random at first glance but is in fact well motivated, for the essays provide represent- ative approaches that range from discussions of specific texts to individual poets, poetic movements and poetry itself, and reveal in their diversity the sense of Tsetaeva's thought.

In the brief introduction Livingstone touches on a variety of issues which include a comparison with Pasternak, speculation on Tsvetaeva's reasons for turning to prose

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124 Slavic Review

in the 1930s, the historical and personal context in which to consider the prose works, their paronomastic and semantic complexity, and their intellectual and dialogic qual- ities. It goes without saying that more complex questions are raised here than can be adequately dealt with in the brief span allotted to them. Consequently the introduction seems superficial and lacking in cohesion.

In light of the title of the volume it comes as a bit of a surprise to find included in it translations of twelve of Tsvetaeva's poems written between the years 1918 and 1934. The translations are fairly literal renderin-gs of the originals. While they do suggest some of Tsvetaeva's thematic concerns and give an inkling of the type of imagery she employed in describing her art, they convey little of the structure, tone or intent of her poetry, and thus cannot serve as demonstrations of what the essays describe. In place of these poems it may have been better to include the essay on Gronskii, "The Poet Mountaineer," which Livingstone regrets having had to omit for lack of space.

Given the success of Livingstone's translations of the essays-the central task of this volurme-it is particularly regrettable to note the weakness of the apparatus. Dis- appointing are the brief accounts of each of the essays with which the Introduction concludes, as are the "Notes to the Essays" and the "Notes to the Poems" which often leave out important references and include others that appear marginal. The "Index of Writers" suffers from a similar lack of discretion between pertinent and marginal information and is generally inadequate. Characteristic are the entries on Heine and Holderlin which are limited to the laconic designation "German poet." Schiller too is characterized in this way but his entry is expanded to include the startling information that he was the "foremost dramatist of German classicism."

TFhe statement of purpose offered by Livingstone in her introduction is both clear and admirable: "... to make Tsvetaeva more widely known as a writer of prose ... ancl to help commnunicate to English-readers her thoughts about what it means to be a poet." The weakness of the apparatus notwithstanding, the translations of the essays in this slender volume should serve as a useful introduction to Tsvetaeva's poetics.

OLGA PETERS HAST1-Y

University of Pennsylvadia

Essays on Gogol, Logos and the Russian Word. Eds. Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. xiii, 291 pp. Index. $42.95, hard bound.

One opens a collection of essays derived from a conference with a certain amount of trepidation. There is always the fear that instead of a coherent approach to a well defined topic, one will be confronted with a disjointed group of more or less uncon- nected essays which really had no business being brought together under one cover. Thankfully, the present volume is not such a case, rather the opposite in fact. As the editors tell us in their short but informative introductory essay, "the conferen-ce 'The Logos of Gogol' set out to identify systems of thought that define Gogol's sense of his literary mission and to formulate approaches to Gogol"s work capable of accom- modating new readings." A secondary, although equally important goal must have been to break down some of the barriers between American, "Soviet" and emigre Gogol' scholarship. The book contains contributions from such eminent "Soviets" as Iurii Mann and Sergei Bocharov; emigres include Alexander Zholkovsky and Mikhail Weiskopf; while Americans of various generations are represented by Robert Louis Jackson, Gary Saul Morson, Susanne Fusso and others.

In general, the collection contains two types of essays: those that atteimipt a readin-g of a single Gogol' work and those that make global claims about Gogol's oeuvre. But of course, and this is the case in the most successful essays, the two are by no means mutually exclusive. Thus, for example, Sergei Bocharov extends a previously published close reading of "The Nose" into a discussion of the relationship of the outer to the

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