This impressive interdisciplinary collection is dedicated to creativity as a relay race across time, as it analyzes three versions of A Love of Three Oranges whose authors inspired future generations through the timeless phenomenon of artistic intertextuality. Starting with Count Carlo Gozzi's The Love of Three Oranges, a stage collaboration with the commedia dell'arte virtuoso performer Antonio Sacchi in eighteenth-century Venice, the narrative takes readers up to the twentieth-century Russian Silver Age and Vsevolod Meyerhold's stage experimentation. The journey ends with the composer Sergei Prokofiev's provocative and playful operatic work, shocking in its musical novelty, that premiered in Chicago in 1921. The whimsical and fantastic plot of Gozzi's fiaba (not a scripted drama per se, but a scenario for improvisational acting), L'amore delle tre melarance, combines a magic children's fairy tale with Italian folklore to depict a hypochondriac prince whose mysterious illness could be cured only by laughter. The play was first performed in Venice at the Teatro San Samuele in 1761 and, according to Gozzi's preface, was intended to be “‘no more than a buffoonish caricatural parody of the works by Signori Goldoni and Chiari that were shown in theatres at that time’” (47). In turn, Meyerhold saw in Gozzi's opposition to Goldoni's style of comedy his own opposition to the psychological realism preached by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. In close collaboration with Vladimir Soloviev and Konstantin Vogak, Meyerhold wrote Love for Three Oranges: A Divertissement in Twelve Scenes, which reinterpreted Gozzi's fiaba. Prokofiev employed Gozzi's and Meyerhold's motifs in the libretto for his opera Love for Three Oranges, which aimed to overturn the existing tradition of musical harmony. As a whole, this volume vividly demonstrates how each version was characterized by a dashingly liberating spirit of artistic experimentation.

Structured in three parts, this richly illustrated volume contains English translations of the original Italian and Russian texts as well as scholarly articles, providing background information and rather short critical notes. The volume starts with Carol Emerson's insightful preface, which addresses the healing and ambivalent nature of laughter. In their introductory notes, the three self-described “eccentric editors,” Dassia Posner, Kevin Bartig, and Maria De Simone, familiarize the reader with the form and content of their kaleidoscopic study. In Posner's words: “Timed to mark the centenary of the world premiere of Prokofiev's opera, this collection of essays and translations provides the first interdisciplinary analysis of the Three Oranges authors, their fairy-tale manifestos, and their theatrical revolutions. Together, the book's authors reveal that these revolutions, the ripple effects of which are ubiquitous in modern theatre, can be understood fully only by examining their innovation together” (3). The international group of seventeen contributors includes scholars in such diverse fields as Anglophone, Slavic, and Italian studies; musicology; visual arts; and theatre history. Although the volume contains occasional repetitions of similar background information presented by different contributors, the repeated passages are introduced each time in different contexts and do not affect the overall flow of the narrative.

Part I, “The Fiaba,” provides Maria De Simone's first full English translation of Gozzi's fiaba and engaging essays by Giulietta Bazoli, Domenico Pietropaolo, Ted Emery, and Natalya Baldyga. The authors reconstruct Venetian cultural life in the eighteenth century, when commedia dell'arte was already in a stage of decline, and depict the fascinating debates about the role of fantasy and imagination onstage. Part II, “The Divertissement,” includes Posner's translation of Vogak, Meyerhold, and Soloviev's divertissement, which has never been previously published, as well as enlightening essays by Raissa Raskina, Vadim Shcherbakov, Laurence Senelick, and Julia Galanina. The entries are dedicated to such issues as the Russian modernist interest in Gozzi, the commedia dell'arte myth in Russian culture, Konstantin Miklashevsky's contribution to the study of the commedia dell'arte, and Prokofiev's libretto's reliance on both the fabia and divertissement. Part III, “The Opera,” opens with Kevin Bartig's translation of Prokofiev's libretto, which features a detailed textual comparison with Meyerhold's divertissement. The scholars Inna Naroditskaya, Natalia Savkina, Simon A. Morrison, and John E. Bowlt provide a solid background on Prokofiev's musical composition, placing his opera in its historic and artistic context. Bartig's essay “Oranges in Leningrad” concludes the volume with a discussion of the Prokofiev opera's reception in the Soviet Union.

Regrettably, in the conclusion of her essay “Tsardom and Buttocks: From Empress Anna to Prokofiev's Fata Morgana,” Naroditskaya provides an erroneous account of an eighteenth-century historical episode. Narodnitskaya claims that “according to an official document of 1731,” the Empress Anna, “‘squeezed from both sides’ by Pantalone and Harlequin,” then smacked the masked characters’ faces and lifted her skirts (352). In fact, according to the historic documents (first published by Swiss musicologist Alloys Mooser in 1943), the Russian Empress was never involved in this comic confrontation, and had left the performance hall together with her entourage before this incident. Instead, it was une folle de la cour—a female court jester—who had a comic confrontation with the Italian performers. Otherwise, such a disregard for social hierarchy would undoubtedly have created serious consequences for the Italian comedians. Despite this oversight, Part III succeeds in reconstructing the history of Prokofiev's opera by tracing its performances and indebtedness to Russian and Western musical culture and providing intriguing biographical details.

Three Loves for Three Oranges deserves an honorable place on university library shelves and furnishes scholars and students of Western and Russian performing arts with valuable material, accentuating once again the Russian modernist indebtedness to the aesthetics of the Italian commedia dell'arte. Illuminating the phenomena of artistic inspiration and cross-fertilization across temporal and geographic borders, this collection would certainly attract a general readership interested in theatre and opera.