Oliver Ready is well known as a prize-winning literary translator, equally adept at translating Fedor Dostoevskii's Crime and Punishment as well as contemporary authors from Vladimir Sharov to Iurii Buida. His deep understanding of both Russian cultural tradition and contemporary Russian literature—and the term “contemporary” here covers at least the last fifty years—finds a new manifestation in his monograph Persisting in Folly: Russian Writers in Search of Wisdom, 1963–2013. The book pursues—and successfully accomplishes—the goal to isolate and analyze the literary discourse that crystalized around the motif of the fool in late Soviet (predominantly underground) and post-Soviet literature. Ready engages deeply with dozens of texts, providing insightful and erudite reading of them and, most importantly, revealing their dialogic relations with one another as well as with broader literary and cultural contexts.

In the daring and intellectually rich introduction, Ready explores the roots of “the Russian cult of the fool” (2). According to his interpretation, although universal, this cult, or more precisely, the fool discourse in Russia, reflects the gap between the intelligentsia and the people, offering paradoxical ways of bridging it. At the same time, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries this discourse functioned as a prominent form of anti-rationalist critique, undermining modernity's cult of reason. Insomuch that the Soviet modernity is rationalist, “the Bolshevik Revolution only served to deepen the literary cult of folly, which was redeployed to offer radical challenges to Soviet ideology: to atheism, scientism, and ‘Procrustean’ rationalism” (4). The late Soviet period stands out due to additional factors coming into play. Among them, Ready highlights “the increasingly sclerotic nature of official discourse” (40), as well as the Thaw-period's infatuation with the scientific progress associated mainly with the Space program and the ITR-culture. Additionally, the reinvention of the fool discourse in nonconformist literature was triggered by the government's use of mental asylum as a form of dissidents’ persecution. Resultantly, what emerged was “the inverted discourse of wisdom and folly among non-conformist intelligentsia” (44), which becomes the main subject of Persisting in Folly.

As follows from Ready's analysis, the discourse of folly surfaced in Russian and late-Soviet literature as a critical double of the discourse of political, symbolic, and intellectual power. Notably, Persisting in Folly discovers that this discourse shaped “a strikingly male tradition” (5). Although it definitely marginalized and frequently repressed the woman and her perspective, it was rather homoerotic than patriarchal per se. Ready notices “the overwhelmingly male (‘homosocial’) bias of [Andrei Platonov's] fiction” (36). He argues that “… the amorous zeal displayed by Venichka is no more than a genre requirement… .” (108); in School for Fools, Nymphaea's “sexuality, like that of Venedikt Erofeev's Venichka, seems pre-adolescent,” while the Nymphaea alba with which he identifies himself is associated with androgyny. Dmitrii Galkovskii's narrator and protagonist “is emasculated and lives a life without sex” (266). Most violently, in Viktor Erofeev's “Life with an Idiot,” “the foolish utopia” (239) leads to the torture and murder of the woman by two male protagonists who have become lovers. Even when post-Soviet texts introduced the female perspective and female holy fools, the situation did not change much—for example, Ready aptly identifies Svetlana Vasilenko's A Little Fool as “more feminizing than feminist” (381).

The question arises: how does the scholar select texts for his analysis? Which also means: how does he define his “fools”? Ready follows Andrei Siniavskii's book on Ivan-the-Fool and Mikhail Epstein's commentary to it, when defining “foolishness (durachestvo) as a form of creative emptiness,” a “metaphysics of non-knowing” (8). In accordance with this definition, the author of Persisting in Folly is mainly interested in different variations of holy fools (yurodivyi) and those characters whose “foolishness” manifests their role as social/cultural outcasts and/or sources for the defamiliarizing narrative perspective. Hence, a madman, a child, and, in the last chapter, genuine intellectual disability, are the main forms of foolishness in the monograph. The parameters of each category are not defined too rigidly (which is great), but at times they blur, especially in the last part dealing with post-Soviet literature. Notably, destructive fools or foolish tricksters, as well as tricksters pretending to be fools, remain outside the scope of Ready's volume.

Part I of the book, titled “In Praise of Folly,” includes chapters on Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki, Iuz Aleshkovsky's Nikolai Nikolaevich and The Hand, as well as Sasha Sokolov's School for Fools. All three chapters are truly excellent, full of insightful observations and daring conceptualizations. Persisting in Folly connects Nicholas of Cusa's “ideas of ‘enfolding’ and the reconciliation of opposites [that] can be traced in Moscow-Petushki at the level of style” (118) with the concept of yurodivyi, which “involves the rejection of binary categories—good and evil, beauty and ugliness, wisdom and folly—in favor of a ‘coincidence of opposites’” (281). Ready characterizes Aleshkovsky's novels as confronting the cult of science and scientific rationality which was on the rise in the 1960s, “through the form and language of his fiction, aimed not just against intellectualism but even (ostensibly) literacy; and through a countervailing cult of sex” (137). Although Aleshkovsky's characters are certainly not fools, they are “principally” foolish, since they realize that the body, with its needs and desires, is smarter than rationality, let alone ideology. The analysis of Sokolov's School for Fools highlights another important aspect of folly: its association with childhood and insanity. The most interesting aspect of this chapter is the author's focus on “the crucial nexus in the novel between idiocy, authority and violence” (202). Persisting in Folly proposes an original interpretation of School for Fools as the representation of “the national trauma of state repression in childish language” (206), which, on a formal level, leads to “an image of stasis disguised by the panoply of roles and fantasies with which the narrator plays” (208). In other words, this inimitable novel is nevertheless “deprived of the possibility of narrative development” (209).

The second part of the book, “Appraisals of Folly,” includes two chapters—each dedicated to the text that continues and yet significantly shifts the discourse of folly as an alternative to reason. One of these texts is the short story “Life with an Idiot” by Viktor Erofeev, another—Dmitrii Galkovskii's scandalous book of self-commentaries Endless Dead End. As already mentioned, Ready persuasively interprets “Life with an Idiot” as a parody and subversion of the Russian intellectuals’ cult of folly. His analysis shows “how intellectual reverence for the idiot as a figure at once sub-human and supra-human (a ‘god’) is an integral mechanism in the circular destructive patterns of Russian culture and history” (114). Erofeev's story presents Vova as “a parody of the holy fool” (234); unlike Aleshkovsky's Nikolai Nikolaevich, in “Life with an Idiot,” “the sexual appetite of the fool does not revitalize a sterile world; quite the opposite” (236). This chapter, probably the best one in the book, ends with a sober conclusion, directly derived from Erofeev's “assault on the cult of the folly”: “… the cult of the fool typically rises up from the positions of irresponsibility, from the befuddled sub-cultures of unsanctioned literature. The two worlds can coexist comfortably enough: the fool-playing author does not necessarily threaten the system (recall the Politburo happily reading Nikolai Nikolaevich), while his own defenses give him (to quote Erofeev …) a ‘haven where the Russian soul, worn out by evil, is ready to hide’” (243). The subsequent analysis of Galkovskii's opus magnum sadly confirms this diagnosis. The Endless Dead End is a metatext that, like “Life with an Idiot,” brings the discourse of Russian folly to its extremes and in earnest achieves results, comparable to Erofeev's parody. The fact that this position, despite its alleged nonconformism, can well coexist with repression, finds a spectacular confirmation in Galkovskii's antisemitism, to which Persisting in Folly gives a sober assessment.

The final part, “Continuations and New Directions since 1991,” presents a wide spectrum of reinterpretations of the discourse of folly in post-Soviet literature. Here Ready writes about such numerous and diverse authors as Viktor Pelevin (Chapter 6); Aleksandr Terekhov, Oleg Pavlov, German Sadulaev, Vladimir Makanin, and Vladimir Sharov (Chapter 7); Iurii Buida, Svetlana Vasilenko, Mikhail Shishkin, Aleksandr Ilichevsky, Aleksandr Snigirev, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Evgeny Vodolazkin (Chapter 8). Persisting in Folly carefully traces variations and slight shifts of the discourse in the 1970s–80, as well as “skillful adaptation of samizdat artistic strategies for comic and satiric effect” (291), but does not detect any radical innovations, except for “the discovery of intellectual disability as an artistic subject filled with mystery and power” (387) and the mythologization of the “primary texts” and their authors, such as the myth of Venichka [Erofeev] in Makanin's Underground, or The Hero of Our Time. Hence, the theme of the discourse's exhaustion that unifies different works under Ready's analysis.

What are the reasons for this exhaustion? Is it reflective of the collapse of Soviet modernity? But don't we now see the restoration of the Soviet symbolic glory in the official rhetoric and mass culture of the 2010s? Perhaps the prevalence of anti-western sentiment in contemporary Russia—which in Russian tradition is read as anti-rationalist—diminishes the critical potential of the discourse of folly, while its affirmative powers are too subversive to be adopted by the mainstream? It is possible, although frequent self-imaging of the Russians as orcs in pulp literature (see Eliot Borenstein's Plots against Russia) in a certain way invokes the potential of the late-Soviet cult of folly. Furthermore, one may observe how this discourse has migrated into visual and popular culture and formed self-ironic, yet incredibly attractive models of “foolish” self-identification as offered by Sergei Shnurov's songs and music videos, as well as such films as The Land of Oz by Vasilii Sigarev, The Fool (Durak) by Iurii Bykov, and TV series as Fizruk or Olga. In other words, the discourse of folly has not been exhausted; rather, it became adopted by popular culture and left the borders of literature.

I doubt that Oliver Ready would consider writing a second volume about these “extensions” and “adoptions,” yet other scholars could pursue it to explain how this discourse mutates and which of its original characteristics preserve their power even in popular culture. Persisting in Folly offers a rich arsenal of analytical methods and artistic precedents, thereby encouraging us to use its central concept as the intellectual tool in further scholarly endeavors. At the same time, it offers a very convincing history of the “irrationalist” discourse in its historical development through at least fifty years of Russian history, an exemple for other scholars to emulate who research/write about histories of various discourses that developed alongside the discourse of folly. Finally, this book is written in an elegant and witty prose, and I already anticipate how my undergraduate and graduate students will enjoy reading and discussing it.