Empire of Objects will become a touchstone for future generations of Iurii Trifonov scholars. Moving well beyond what he identifies as the traditional scholarly focus on Trifonov’s late novels, and especially The House on the Embankment, Benjamin M. Sutcliffe offers a concise account of Trifonov’s whole oeuvre and charts compelling connections between the author’s early and late writings. Sutcliffe identifies a cluster of thematic concerns that are as integral to Trifonov’s debut novel, Students (1950), which earned him a Stalin prize, as they are to The House on the Embankment (1976) and other late novels known for their critique of Stalinism. These concerns include the human body, consumption, and sincerity, which Sutcliffe suggests are closely connected to one another as well as to memory, trauma, and history in Trifonov’s works. In his introductory chapter, Sutcliffe argues convincingly that Trifonov’s varied explorations of these themes reveal his lifelong attunement to tensions between material and immaterial facets of social life in the Soviet Union as well as his opposition to official Soviet narratives of historical progress. Given the crucial importance of each of these themes and tensions within Soviet literature and culture, readers approaching Empire of Objects with the hope of learning about more than just Trifonov will not be disappointed.

At the heart of this book is the paradoxical status of materiality in the Soviet Union: against the backdrop of the Russian intelligentsia’s self-avowed hostility to material values, there arose a Marxist-Leninist and later a Stalinist insistence on the importance of material bodies and goods as both the building blocks and the showpieces of the new social order. According to Sutcliffe, the complex moral valence of bodies and things amidst state-driven efforts to remake them in service to the communist project is central to Trifonov’s works, which manifest the author’s enduring critique of materialism (understood as the prioritization of material comfort) as well as evolving cultural understandings of sincerity (iskrennost´) in the Soviet Union. Whereas Students celebrates a Stalinist version of sincerity that is “defined by a state demanding that one’s inner thoughts mirror external loyalty,” as shown in Sutcliffe’s Ch. 1, Slaking the Thirst refigures sincerity as an “honest’ but tentative discussion of Stalin’s crimes,” as shown in Ch. 2 (8, 10). Sutcliffe points out, however, that in Slaking the Thirst and other works after 1953, Trifonov most often hints at sincerity “by portraying its opposite: a deceitful avarice that included whitewashing the crimes of Stalinism” (10). This assertion is not only helpful for locating sincerity precisely where it is not in Trifonov’s works, but also for clarifying the connection Sutcliffe posits between sincerity and the other key terms of his study: it is in characters’ “deceitful avarice” that we find Trifonov’s implication of materialistic characters in the historical traumas of Stalinism and the attempted erasure of those traumas from the national memory.

As promised in his book’s subtitle, Sutcliffe explores Trifonov’s works in an imperial framework. In particular, Ch. 2 highlights the author’s narrative engagements with peripheral locations far beyond Moscow: Turkmenia (in the story collection, Under the Sun, and the novel, Slaking the Thirst); the Don, the Caucasus, and the Urals (in the dokumental´naia povest´ about his father’s experience during the Civil War, The Bonfire’s Glow); and the Baltics (in the story, “It Was Noon in Summertime”). Uniting the various sections of this chapter is the sense that although Trifonov does not challenge assumptions about Russia’s right to exercise control over the labor, resources, and territory of other Soviet republics, his works suggest that the shining ideal of Communist progress was hard to sustain amidst the material realities—and the rising public awareness—of imperialism during the Thaw. This reviewer would have appreciated an even more sustained and explicit discussion of these issues, but Sutcliffe has done important work in drawing attention to them and opening lines for further inquiry.

Moreover, by articulating meaningful connections between materiality, morality, and time, Sutcliffe fashions a valuable new lens for studying Soviet and post-Soviet literature and culture. This is especially true in his treatment of memory in Chs. 3 and 4, which examine Trifonov’s Moscow novellas of the late 1960s through mid-1970s and his final works from the 1970s through 1981, respectively. His concluding chapter extends this effort by showing how Trifonov’s writing influenced subsequent authors, including I. Grekova (Elena Venttsel´), Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Liudmila Petrushevskaia. Together with judiciously placed commentary throughout the book about recent events, including Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, this chapter supports the overall impression given by the book that the study of Trifonov remains relevant to a wide range of readers interested in the former Soviet space today.

In sum, Empire of Objects is a slender yet satisfying book. It makes an original contribution to scholarship and is written in clear and accessible prose. While focusing on a tightly articulated set of concerns that cut across the Stalin, Thaw, and Brezhnev eras, Sutcliffe positions his subject matter in dialog with Russia’s current political climate, increasing his book’s likely appeal for undergraduate and graduate students of Russian and Soviet culture as well as for professional scholars of the region.