Zhar"-Ptitsa. No. 1, 1921.Review by: John E. BowltSlavic Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1984), pp. 159-160Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2498810 .

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Reviews 159

exhausted it; for example, more information on the connotations of "Zosima," the name as well as the character, is available in Sven Linn6r's Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: A Study in the Mimesis of Virtue, Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature, vol. 4 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wicksell International, 1975). The author's approach is essentially etymological, while sociolinguistic and literary aspects are dealt with only coincidentally: the names "Pokrovskii" and "Razumikhin," for instance, are explained etymologically, but no mention is made of the fact that these names are typical of the lower clergy and thus label their bearers socially. It is more important to know the literary connections with Gogol' of the names "Devushkin" and "Zheltopuz" than their literal meaning. Also important is the fact that some of the Christian names have developed certain associations in Dostoevskii's personal code, for instance Katerina as opposed to Liza.

The author's fertile imagination has caused him to ascribe a symbolic function to a very large number of names, often too daringly, and sometimes in disregard of more solid leads as in the case of "Fetyukovich," for which a passage in the fourth chapter of Dead Souls gives us a better lead. Passage's etymologies are usually correct, but some are misleading or too fanciful. For example, saying only that "Fanariotova" suggests fonar', "lantern; streetlight; headlight (of a vehicle)," is misleading since the suffix gives the name a Byzantine ring, quite in accord with its bearer's aristocratic origins. The name "Bykov," contrary to Passage's assumption, is at least as common as "Bukov." "Ruten- shpits" is simply a reversed shpitsriten, a Russian dictionary word all too current in the 1840s, and so it is quite irrelevant that the German Rute also has the meaning "penis." Nevertheless, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, the book will be of some use to the attentive reader of Dostoevskii.

VICTOR TERRAS Brown University

ZHAR"-PTITSA. No.1, 1921. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983. (Reprint.) 44 pp. Illustrationls. $20.00, cloth. $8.95, paper.

This reprint of the first number of the art and literary review Zhar"-ptitsa is one more valuable contribution by Ardis to our widening appreciation of the richness and diversity of the Russian Silver Age. Zhar`-ptitsa was not an avant-garde journal and, in many respects, was diametrically opposed to the other Russian Berlin art magazine of the time, Veshch'lGegenstandlObjet (1922), which, incidentally, Ardis would do well to include in its reprint program. Rather, Zha'`-ptitsa strove to maintain the elegance and restraint of the prerevolutionary World of Art group with emphasis on the book design of Art Nouveau, orientation toward the theater arts, and strong interest in artistic synthesism. In fact, one of the articles here, by Georgii Lukomskii, was devoted to the renewed activities of World of Art artists in Paris.

Zhar'-ptitsa, 1921, No. 1, was an exquisite publication, and even though this reprint renders the brilliant color cover (by Sergei Chekhonin) and color illustrations (Vasilii Shukhaev, Sergei Sudeikin et al.) only in monochrome, the reader still recognizes the scrupulous concern with layout and typographical design felt by the journal's editors A. E. Kogan, G. K. Lukomskii and Sasha Chernyi. The short stories (by Evgenii Chirikov and N. A. Teffi), the poems (by Konstantin Bal'mont, Chernyi, Sergei Makov- skii and, of course, Vladimir Sirin), the review articles on the European tour of the Moscow Arts Theater (by Makovskii), on the art of Sudeikin (by Aleksei Tolstoi), and on the latest choreography of Michel Fokine (by Aleksei Pleshcheev) also impress by their serenity and sense of measure - and perhaps for this very reason appealed to a recent emigration still nostalgic for the Russia of yesteryear: unlike Veshch' which folded after

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160 Slavic Review

only its second issue, Zhar"-ptitsa was a commercial success for over five years and had outlets as far away as New York and Buenos Aires.

We should be grateful to Ardis for enabling us to renew our acquaintance with Zhar"-ptitsa, one of the most impressive reviews of the Russian emigration. Needless to say, a reprinting of the full run would be very welcome.

JOHN E. BOWLT University of Texas, Austin

SOBRANIE STIKHOTVORENII. By Konstantin Vaginov. Edited by Leonid Chertkov. Foreword by V. Kazak. Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, no. 26 (edited by Wolf- gang Kasack). Munich: Otto Sagner, 1982. 236 pp.

In the welter of literary acronyms coined during the 1920s, one of the oddest-Oberiu- designated the Leningrad avant-garde group whose full name was "Ob"edinenie real'nogo iskusstva." Only one of the "Oberiuty," Nikolai Zabolotskii, went on to win any kind of reputation. But Soviet critics for the most part kept silent about his participation in the Oberiu, emphasizing the last period of his verse and ignoring his brilliant and highly unconventional early works. (The collection Stolbtsy [1929] did not become available to Soviet readers in anything like its original form until the early 1970s.) Of the group itself, virtually nothing was known. But in the mid-1960s, the efforts of a dedicated and persistent band of young Leningrad scholars began to pay off. They squeezed into print a few works by Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii and managed to publish at home and abroad some notices about them and about Oberiu in general, while generously sharing texts and information with interested Western scholars. Nothing came of attempts to publish the works of Oberiu writers either individually or as a group. Western publishers, as usual, had to fill the gap.

Tat'iana Nikol'skaia and Leonid Chertkov concentrated their efforts on the poetry and prose of Konstantin Vaginov. He had published three small collections of verse and three novels before his death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five in 1934. Vaginov had contacts with many of the avant-garde groups and activities (especially those of the Dom pechati) which made Leningrad, still a "window on the West," the most fascinating city in Russia in the 1920s (and among the most interesting in Europe too, a story which awaits its chronicler). His name figures in the Oberiu manifesto, which speaks of his fantasmagoriia mira; but the weirdly skewed vantage point of his prose and poetry, with its often alogical imagery and its bizarre juxtapositions of widely separated times and places, is that of the quintessential outsider, who observes the collapse of the old world (the gibel' Peterburga) and finds no place for himself in the new one.

None of Vaginov's works was republished in the Soviet Union after his death. Works like the novel Garpagoniada (recently issued by Ardis) and the late verse cycle "Zvuko- podobie" remained unpublished. Fortunately, his widow preserved his legacy through the perilous years when the Leningrad avant-garde was silenced by imprisonment and executions. She gave Nikol'skaia and Chertkov access to the papers. Now, fifteen years after their joint article in Den' poezii (Leningrad, 1967), which brought Vaginov to our attention and prompted Ardis to issue facsimiles of the tiny first two verse collections, Chertkov, who subsequently settled in the West, has edited the most complete collection of Vaginov's poetry we are ever likely to have. It is all here, from the "prophetic delirium" of the early verse, to that "clarity in excitement" (to borrow an oddly apt phrase of Edwin Denby about the choreography of Balanchine) of the complex "neoclas- sical" final poems which are unlike anything in modern Russian verse.

Chertkov gives us more than thirty unpublished poems and presents the original collections in the form Vaginov intended. His notes could be clearer in textual matters

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