Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism by Victor ErlichReview by: Georgette DonchinThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 105-106Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4207398 .

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REVIEWS I05

studied more than any other critic. Even so, one may point to some sur- prising omissions: the shadowy 'white domino' of Bely's Peterburg and the 'thorny crown of revolutions' foreseen in Mayakovsky's Oblako v shtanakh would both seem to contribute something to the final lines of the poem. One might also recall Herzen's words about the 'new Christians coming to destroy ... these barbarians, this new world, these Nazarenes, coming to finish off the decrepit and feeble and to clear a space for the fresh and new, are closer than you think'.

There are a few surprising slips: on p. i98 Dr Hackel translates Blok's words of April, I92 I: 'The louse has conquered the whole world . . .' as 'We have conquered . ..'; and it is a pity that the non-word 'unctious' should have twice slipped into the text. But anyone who reads Dr Hackel's book will agree that these criticisms do not seriously detract from his achievements, within the limitations that he has set himself, or from the many stimulating suggestions in which his book abounds. Quite rightly, he ends with the text of Dvenadtsat', to which his book has served as commentary and introduction. As with all good criticism, one is brought back finally to the work of art. Toronto R. D. B. THOMSON

Erlich, Victor (ed.). Twentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1975. ix +317 pp. Index. ?9.00.

Gogolfrom the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays. Selected, edited, trans- lated, and introduced by Robert A. Maguire. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, I974. Xii+4I5 pp. Frontispiece. Bibliography. Indexes. $I7.50.

IT has become a fact of life that Russian scholars outside the Soviet Union tend increasingly to publish for the non-specialist. This, arising from the decline in the impetus of Slavonic studies of the Ig6os, the arith- metic of the publishing trade, and the pressure on academics to publish at all cost, need not necessarily be bemoaned provided standards of scholarship are upheld. A long-range result of such policy may still, one hopes, be a revival of Russian studies in the Western world.

The two anthologies under review are a case in point. Both Professor Erlich of Yale and Professor Maguire of Columbia have avoided populari- zation. On the contrary, they have put their knowledge and scholarship at the disposal of the intelligent English-speaking reader of Russian literature and, more likely than not, at the service of the academic student who happens to have no Russian or whose Russian is not good enough. Moreover, many of the items included are difficult to come by even in the original.

Victor Erlich's aim is to exemplify in seventeen essays the 'diversity of twentieth-century Russian criticism by featuring several successive or concurrent critical perspectives, stances, and individual styles' (p. vii). The Symbolists, the Formalists and near-Formalists, early Soviet- Marxists, emigre critics, and recent protagonists are all represented by

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Io6 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

essays the selection of which has been governed by necessarily complex criteria of quality, relative historic importance, and an attempt not to duplicate available translations. The latter criterion has not been entirely sustained, but it explains the absence of, for instance, two important pieces on Gogol' by Eykhenbaum and Chizhevsky (both included in Maguire), or the absence of an example from Bakhtin's seminal book on Dostoyevsky. No selection of texts can satisfy every reader, and this re- viewer would have liked a much broader representation of Symbolist criticism, and at least a sample of Rozanov, Shestov, Mochul'sky and Zamyatin. It is interesting to note in passing that not a single one of the twentieth-century critical essays selected by Konovalov and Richards (see Slavonic Review, vol. LIII, no. I 3 ) in their Russian-language anthology coincides with Erlich's selection. Nonetheless, the examples offered- Bely and Annensky on Gogol', Shklovsky on Pushkin and Sterne and on Tolstoy, Eykhenbaum on Pushkin's prose and on Tolstoy's crises, Tyn- yanov on Dostoyevsky and Gogol', Zhirmunsky on Blok, Jakobson on 'a generation that squandered its poets', Trotsky on Mayakovsky, Voronsky on Babel', Aldanov on Tolstoy, Bitsilli on Chekhov, Adamovich on Nabokov, Sinyavsky on Pasternak, Lakshin on Bulgakov, and finally Lidiya Ginzburg on Mandel'shtam-are all of interest if not of equal merit and, together, give a fair idea of the vitality of twentieth-century Russian criticism. The editor's introduction (pp. 3-30) is clear, succinct and informative, and could have made up for any lacunae of selection if the development of pre-Symbolist criticism had been treated in greater detail.

It is not accidental that Victor Erlich opens his selection with two essays on Gogol'. Of all the Russian classic writers, Gogol' has been the most 'irresistible' to critics (a recent reviewer has remarked rightly that 'Gogol' is well able to survive the attentions of his critics'). Robert Maguire selected, annotated and translated eleven twentieth-century essays to 'elucidate Gogol's art from an angle generally unfamiliar to readers who know no Russian' (p. viii). The essays are intended to illustrate the psychological, the religious, the sociological and the formalist approaches of modern Russian criticism. The critics represented are Merezhkovsky, Bryusov, Pereverzev, Yermakov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vasily Gippius, tykhenbaum, Chizhevsky, Slonimsky, and Leon Stilman. With the exception of Eykhenbaum's famous 'How Gogol's Overcoat Is Made', all the pieces included are translated into English for the first time. A note of discontent: the anthology should have begun with Rozanov rather than with Merezhkovsky, and the absence of Bely is only forgivable if the student complements the present volume with Erlich's anthology. Professor Maguire's introduction (pp. 3-54) is a helpful and lucid exposition of the major trends in Gogol' criticism, and fills in the nineteenth-century background without which the impact of the twentieth-century criticism would remain largely unexplained. It is an essay which can be recom- mended to the specialist and the non-specialist alike. London GEORGETTE DONCHIN

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