Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature inHistorical Perspective by Stephen Lowell; Birgit MenzelReview by: Martha Brill OlcottSlavic Review, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 857-858Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148509 .

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Book Reviews 857

ject adapted here for the Cambridge Companion format). This section would have bene- fitted from exploring such understudied topics as, for example, "Nabokov and Theater," "Nabokov and Music," or "Nabokov and Art."

The volume is framed by both a chronology and a guide to further reading-both useful, albeit not without flaws. Russian Nabokoviana seems underrepresented here-a fact that is quite upsetting considering Nabokov's bilingual and multifaceted cultural her- itage. The guide credits Nina Berberova's The Italics Are Mine (1969), which has a few pages on Nabokov (which he criticized as inaccurate), but none of the five highly informative volumes of the scholarly almanac Nabokovskii vestnik, published since 1998.

In summary, although the articles represent solid pieces of professional scholarship, the ultimate question remains: what new impact will The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov produce?

YURI LEVING Dalhousie University

Readingfor Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective. Ed. Stephen Lowell and Birgit Menzel. Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, vol. 78. Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2005. 202 pp. Notes. Bibliography. ?32.00, paper.

This volume, a collection of eight essays, delivers precisely what its title promises, an overview of Russia's major "nonliterary" literary genres--mysteries, science fiction, ro- mance, historical potboilers, and, what seems to be unique to Russia (although it may be captured in the west by comic books), the boevik, or action-hero book.

To be sure, the title is somewhat disingenuous, in that many of the essays-Marina Koreneva's on detective fiction, for example, or Birgit Menzel's on science fiction-reach back into Soviet, or even tsarist, times, to show that reading just for fun, or for excitement, or to kill time, has always taken place in Russia, even if the authorities, and most readers, prefer to aver that Russians read only for enlightenment and moral uplift.

The result is the most complete imaginable catalogue of Russian popular culture as it exists today, at least in its written form. Although there are repeated signs--or reports of signs, which may perhaps be more wish than reality-that Russian readers are tiring of pulp and beginning again to become the fanatically serious readers we knew them to be in the Soviet period, the reality seems still to be that when Russia reads today, it pretty much reads junk. What this collection leaves out, although there are some hints at the fact, is that even reading junk is today a declining part of popular culture in Russia, which now has television and music and the Internet and a reviving domestic film industry (to say nothing of immediate access to Hollywood's outpourings), and all the other "blessings" of a commercial media environment to compete against the printed word.

Not that things are better in the United States or Europe, where serious literature has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur, either vanishing completely or becoming so hyper-specialized that it is able to survive only in remote and tiny enclaves. It is that fact, however, that makes Russia's transformation so melancholy for most scholars of Rus- sia literature-it was only in Russia that we could sit up all night discussing books; it was only in Russia that people might quote Pasternak and Petrarch and Poe, all in the same sentence; it was only in Russia that our interest in say, Platonov, was understandable and praiseworthy.

Lovell, Menzel, Koreneva, and their two other coauthors, Boris Dubin and Mariia Cherniak, do a good job of arguing that, although Russia's junk fiction may itself be only junk, it does tell us a great deal about Russia, the Russian character, and "Russian-ness." Koreneva, for example, explores the persistence of Russian distrust of human-made laws and preference for natural law. Dubin is convincing in his speculation that the boevik suc- ceeds as an articulation of Homo sovieticus's confusion after the collapse of the USSR, while Menzel makes a similar point about the adolescent males who seem to be the entire audi- ence for science fiction-in fact a mishmash of magic, legend, and strong handsome he-

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858 Slavic Review

roes who are presumably completely unlike their readers. To Dubin the historical novel is another kind of retreat from reality, a place where Russia is unbowed, strong, and victori- ous. Indeed, the only genre that seems an improvement over the past is that of the ro- mance, which Mariia Cherniak paints not only as a newcomer but also as a sign that Rus- sian women have at long last won the right to retreat to a corner, put their feet up, and sink into an imaginary world where they are treated kindly and with respect.

The question this volume's authors do not answer, however-and which floats over the book like Banquo's ghost-is so what? Unlike the serious Russian fiction of the past, there is little in its pulp that seems to speak to people beyond the country's borders. Boris Akunin's elegant confections about the nineteenth-century upper crust have found an au- dience in English, but none of the other mystery writers have done so (or so Google indi- cates after a quick search). The science fiction and boeviks are even less exportable, and most of the romances, as Cherniak points out, originated abroad, making their translation and export absurd. Once the riddles of "Russian-ness" were a fascination and a worry for the entire world, and any insight into that puzzle was welcome. Now, however, Russia is simply another postimperial country-like Sweden or Holland or Portugal or maybe even England-that is large enough to sustain the pop cultural examination of its own psyche, but not central enough to the world dramas of the day to induce anyone else to care about the outcome of that examination.

Save, that is, for a small circle of experts and other Russophiles. It is to them, to us, that this collection of essays is highly recommended.

MARTHA BRILL OLCOTT Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Prokofiev's Balletsfor Diaghilev. By Stephen D. Press. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2006. xviii, 294 pp. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Musical Examples. $99.95, hard bound.

Sergei Prokofiev's recently published diaries offer a wealth of details about the period the composer spent in Paris, London, and Monte Carlo working for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The first 115 pages of Prokofiev's Ballets for Diaghilev make extensive use of these di- aries, creating a lively opening to a book that offers insight into Prokofiev's approach to ballet, the evolution of his creative methods, and his ambivalent relationship to prevailing trends in Russian and French music, specifically neonationalism and neoclassicism.

Prokofiev composed four ballets for Diaghilev, and overall their history is unhappy. The first, a parable about pagan deities called Ala i Lolli, went unrealized. Unimpressed with the scenario and the unfinished score, Diaghilev instead steered Prokofiev toward a fairytale slapstick titled Chout (The buffoon). Prokofiev completed the first draft in 1915, only to have it rejected by the impresario as un-danceable. Five years later, Prokofiev recomposed the score under Diaghilev's tutelage, the result being a modest but crucial theatrical success. There ensued a Soviet-themed factory ballet called Le Pas d'acier (The dance of steel), which Prokofiev conceived in 1925 in collaboration with the constructiv- ist painter Georgii Iakulov. To their dismay, Diaghilev assigned the staging to the little- experienced choreographer Leonid Massine, who rewrote the act 1 scenario to include a bizarre mixture of episodes from Russian folklore. Despite the tampering, Le Pas d'acier dazzled the fickle audiences of Paris and London. Soviet critics, however, were not amused; when Prokofiev visited Moscow in 1929, he suffered their wrath. During this same year, he completed his final ballet for Diaghilev, the biblical parable Le Fils prodigue (The prodigal son).

Press highlights the lesser-known facts about Prokofiev's interaction with Diaghilev: we learn, for example, that the impresario at one point considered using the composer's Second Piano Concerto for a ballet pantomime; later, he approached Prokofiev about composing an opera. The book develops three different arguments. First, that Prokofiev was much less derivative of Igor Stravinsky in his first ballet than is often claimed. The ar- gument is largely convincing-Press reveals, for example, that Prokofiev's reliance on os- tinato predates his encounter with Stravinsky-but it descends at times into special plead-

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