Polly Jones's latest monograph picks up almost seamlessly from where her previous edited volume on the history of Russian biographical writing, Writing Russian Lives: The Poetics and Politics of Biography in Modern Russian Culture (2018), left off. Where Writing Russian Lives ambitiously spans almost two centuries, Revolution Rekindled offers a microscopic exploration over roughly two decades (late 1960s to 1990) of intense activity centered around the biographical ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ (Plamennye revolutsionery) series. Jones's concluding passage in Writing Russian Lives—in which she describes the Fiery Revolutionaries series as a battleground of “fierce internal consternation over genre, form and the use of imagination” (2018, 172)—sets the scene and develops organically into a 300-page close analysis of these themes and more in Revolution Rekindled. Drawing on the same State-owned archival resources (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History [RGASPI], Central Archive of Socio-Political History of Moscow [TsAOPIM], and State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF]) as utilized in Jones's contribution to Writing Russian Lives, she extends her investigative reach to include additional sources of primary material across locations in Russia (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art [RGALI], Russian State Archive of Contemporary History [RGANI]), Europe (Archive der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Bremen), and the US (Bakhmetoff Archive of Russian and East European Culture). Jones also draws on the domestic archives of key figures concerned with the series, with some of whom she conducted personal interviews. The result is a meticulous investigation, methodologically reminiscent of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's research on publishing networks and Translation Studies scholar Jeremy Munday's microhistorical approach to archival research, of the people, processes, and politics behind the difficult birth and sustained success of Fiery Revolutionaries during the post-Thaw Brezhnev era until its abrupt decline during glasnost and perestroika.
The structure of Jones's study methodically considers all elements of agency regarding the series. The first chapter elucidates the government-publishing house Politizdat's precarious, Janus-like positioning between Central Committee dictates and waning interest among Soviet readers. Jones analyzes the dynamics behind Politizdat's literary turn towards a new, hybrid style of biography: “artistic-documentary,” for which purpose authors were permitted to apply rare (and potentially risky) literary devices in Soviet publications such as “metaphor, imagery… the use of multiple genres” to “achieve the revolution in political literature that the party had demanded” (62). Chapter 2 shifts the focus to the editors (Nikolai Tropkin and Lev Davydov first, followed by, most notably, the long-serving, stalwart series editor Vladimir Novokhatko and his equally committed female supporting staff, Alla Pastukhova, Larisa Rodkina, and Anna Shcherbakova) and the series’ wide-ranging authors (samizdat, dissident, formerly repressed, and future émigré writers, including especially Iurii Trifonov, Vladimir Voinovich, Vasilii Aksenov, and Anatolii Gladilin). This dramatis personae collectively “re-hydrated” political literature (sometimes subversively so) through structurally imaginative revolutionary biographies, of which, we are told, there were 156, dedicated to nineteenth-century political activists in Russia (such as the Decembrists and the People's Will) and beyond (English Levellers, French Jacobins, American abolitionists). Jones's spotlight on their inner machinations and motivations forms a fascinating case study of publishing history that transcends Russo-Soviet area studies and invites comparisons with contemporaneous European book history. (The question arises from my own research, for example, of whether recollections of Penguin Book's supremo Allen Lane's visit to Moscow in 1957 might later have influenced Politizdat's decision to produce affordable, high-volume publishing with healthy author royalties.) Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate the series’ dedication to Brezhnevian historical, literary, and moral turns by its authors’ creative (and often Aesopian) handling of chosen subjects, in particular key activists Pavel Pestel΄, Ivan Pushchin, Andrei Zheliabov, Nikolai Morozov, and Vera Figner. Jones conducts a textual analysis of biographical structures, genre, dramatic, and imaginative devices, and explores the editorial and State censors’ difficulty in fact-checking such politically problematic liberalism. Her insightful analysis of reader responses in Chapter 5 reveals post-Thaw efforts among the literati to curb critics’ concerted attempts to revive the etiquette of Stalinist lit-crit—namely, ad hominem criticism—as illustrated by the case study of the maligned biographer Natan Eidel΄man. Jones's final chapter documents the end of the Fiery Revolutionary era, hurried to an abrupt close by the collapse of the USSR, rapidly changing reader priorities, and untenable economic losses. Every chapter is scrupulously thorough, little more is needed except perhaps some sample illustrations from the work's protagonist: book covers from the series itself, and ideally, also photographs of key figures. Revolution Rekindled brings much of interest to light and will appeal across disciplines to scholars of Russian/Soviet studies, book history, and (political) publishing.
