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MLR, 97.4, 2002 1045 with both Chestnutt's Plantation Tales and Zora Neale Hurston's anthology Mules and Men (1935). Peterson does not confine himself to the nineteenth century. Gorkii's fictionalized autobiography Childhood (1913), N. S. Trubetskoi's little-known treatise Europe and Mankind (1920), and Valentin Rasputin's modern classic Farewell to Matyora are all analysed, together with, and through, their American counterparts. It could perhaps be argued thatthe comparisons are inevitably lopsided, given the world stature ofsome of the Russian works discussed here and the relative obscurity (for a UK readership at least) of the Afro-American authors. However, the comparisons are by no means odious and this book may well achieve the additional effectof introducing readers to such books as Gloria Naylor's Mama Day and Richard Wright's Black Boy. The book is admirably concise and devoid of error. One might quibble with the translation of the title of Solzhenitsyn's famous story 'Zakhar-Kalita' as 'Zakhar's Pouch' (p. 165), and there are just three minor misprints in the extensive notes and bibliography. Even the introduction of Bakhtin in the final chapter is, for once, not gratuitous, although Peterson's avowed intent to avoid Bakhtinianjargon is not wholly successful. However, Bakhtin'sconcept of'double-voicedness' is convincingly shown to be a key feature of all the works discussed in this fascinating book. I have only one regret: no light is shed on the origin of the term 'Russian soul', although it is some compensation to learn (p. 126) that Maxim Gorkii quotes its close, and often equally misused, relative 'breadth ofthe Russian soul' (razmakh dushi) in a letter of 1911. University of Bath Michael Pursglove Bolshevik Ideology and Literature, igi7?ig27. By Roger Cockrell. Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ont., and Lampeter: Mellen. 2000. xii+184 pp. $89.95. It is a curious irony that while the works of Socialist Realism have all but disappeared from the Russian literature reading lists in many universities, there has been an upsurge in theoretical works about the phenomenon itself, one of the more egregious examples being Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, edited by Hans Giinther and Evgenii Dobrenko (St Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2000), which weighs in at over a thousand pages. Roger Cockrell, who has already made a name as a sensitive critic of the work of Aleksandr Fadeev, has written a book which is less than a fifthof the length, yet which also covers a wide range of material. Very much text-based rather than theoretical, Bolshevik Ideology and Literature is a pleasantly written, carefully constructed, and, above all, judicious book, based on the firsteditions of the author's selected texts (an important point, in view of Soviet censorship's role in distorting writers' ideas and intentions, as political attitudes became increasingly intolerant). After a brief introduction, Cockrell devotes his firstchapter to a series of questions which, together with their interconnections with the fiction of the period, form the substanceof his monograph. Should there bea single Party attitude towards literature, and, if so, what should it be? What was the relationship between belles-lettres and political propaganda? How far should Bolshevik culture reflect the fact that it was part of a radically new age, and therefore different in kind from anything that had gone before? Did it make sense to talk about a 'proletarian culture' and, ifso, how far should such a culture be encouraged? What should the attitude be towards Russia's pre-revolutionary past and towards the giants of nineteenth-century literature such as Turgenev, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi? How should the heroes of the new age be portrayed? How far could they be shown in a negative light? To what extent should those artists and writers who were not clearly pro-Bolshevik be made to conform? What kind of sanctions could be brought to bear ifthey did not? 1046 Reviews In approaching these key questions, Cockrell has chosen some twenty-five representative texts from works of prose fiction, excluding poetry and drama, and avoiding texts, like Isaak Babel"s Konarmiia, for instance, which have already received widespread critical attention in the West. Another guiding principle has been the choice of works which might loosely be described as 'sympathetic...
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