This volume consists of fourteen fairly brief chapters examining the “fin-de-siècle” themes in Russian realist literature of the nineteenth century. Additionally, the editors, Ani Kokobobo and Katherine Bowers, provide an introduction; Caryl Emerson an afterword. The team of authors includes both “emerging and established scholars,” to quote the book’s jacket.

The collection is divided into four parts: Part One, titled “The Anxieties of Disintegration,” comprises Kate Holland’s chapter on the theme of degeneration in Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlev Family; Yuri Corrigan on the concepts of selfhood in Fedor Dostoevskii’s Adolescent; Robin Feuer Miller on the literary genealogy and contexts of Fedor Dostoevskii’s “A Boy at Christ’s Christmas Party;” and Alexander Burry and S. Ceilidh Orr on “apocalyptic anxieties” in Anna Karenina.

Part Two, “Destabilizing Gender and Sexuality,” consists of Emma Lieber’s chapter on Ivan Turgenev’s short stores, especially “The First Love,” as well as Connor Doak’s chapter on “masculine degeneration in Dostoevskii’s Demons,” and Jenny Kaminer’s examination of the female characters in Anton Chekhov’s Seagull.

Part Three, titled “Generic Experiments and Hybridity,” features Katherine Bowers’s contribution on the depictions of family decline in Sergei Aksakov, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Ivan Bunin; Ani Kokobobo’s chapter on the grotesque in Lev Tolstoi and Mikhail Artsybashev; Muireann Maguire on Nikolai Gogol’ and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; and Jane Costlow on Vladimir Korolenko and the genre of ocherk.

Part Four, “Facing Death and Decay,” has three essays: Thomas Newlin on “Decadent ecosystems” in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya; Edith Clowes on Leonid Andreev’s “abject realism”; and Ilya Vinitsky’s on Ivan Turgenev’s “drama of dying” as a literary theme.

The editors trace the idea behind this collection to annual Slavic studies conferences, and indeed reading this book through feels (or, at least, has felt to this reviewer) like sitting through four or five ASEEES literary panels in a row: the presentations (in this case, the chapters) are competent and frequently insightful, yet many are either narrowly textual or comparing just two or three canonical works. In addition, while focusing on disparate primary texts, they mainly arrive at strikingly similar conclusions, exposing the fin-de-siècle (or decadent, and/or degeneration) motifs in Russian realist literature starting with Saltykov-Shchedrin and Turgenev all the way to Dostoevskii, Tolstoi and especially (if predictably) Chekhov.

To help identify the fin-de-siècle themes, several contributors make extensive use of Max Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration, 1892), a veritable encyclopedia (and, in Russia, a textbook) of decadence, as well as scholarly works, such as Elaine Showalter’s Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (1991), Olga Matich’s Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (2005), and Mark Steinberg’s Petersburg Fin de Siècle (2011).

The analytical procedure based on finding Nordau-esque themes in the large corpus of mid- and late-nineteenth century Russian realist classics succeeds in directing the reader’s attention to frequently overlooked elements in familiar texts. At the same time, reading for the nth time about Russian writers’ “preoccupation with disharmony and decline,” their “fin-de-siècle anxiety,” “fin-de-siècle angst,” “fin-de-siècle mood,” and “fin-de-siècle sensibility,” it is hard to escape the thought that the scholars build upon (and, to a certain extent, reproduce) the notorious vagueness characteristic of Nordau himself. This Paris-based Austrian physician-turned-journalist was not known for a fine sense of aesthetic distinction, and he threw everything and the kitchen sink in his denunciatory tome. It was not for nothing that Chekhov called the author of Entartung a “rattlebrain” (svistun) and Bernard Shaw described him as being “utterly mad on the subject of generation.” To search for the themes of “degeneration” and “decline” as described by Nordau in a multitude of earlier literary texts and discuss their authors’ use of these themes, doesn’t such an assignment, implicit or explicit, encourage generic responses?

It must be said that when the authors of this book step away from the constraints of its program, they achieve significant results. They do so by providing new literary contexts to the texts they examine (Holland and Feuer Miller), by illuminating them through a study of overlooked cultural and biographical parallels (Newlin), by putting classic texts in new analytical perspectives (Kaminer), and simply by investigating their poetics comparatively and historically (Kokobobo, Costlow).

In the book’s final chapter, Ilya Vinitsky looks into a specific and not widely known case of modernist appropriation of the lugubrious narrative of Turgenev’s terminal illness. Vinitsky demonstrates how modernist poet and critic Innokentii Annenskii turned the nineteenth-century classic’s difficult demise into a metaphor for the death of realism. Vinitsky’s fascinating study, a reworking of his 1997 essay, is firmly rooted in the respected Russian philological method of intertextual analysis. This fact reminds the reader that the novelty of the research topic raised by the book is not absolute, and that this topic can be (and has been) approached in a variety of methodologies, both old and new.

The volume is not free of typographic and other errors: a mysterious “symbolist Konstantin Annensky” makes an appearance in the introduction (10). Burry and Ceilidh Orr base a part of their analysis on Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s very liberal translation of kalach as “a roll” in Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina (73–74), neglecting the fact that the Moscow kalach is actually a kettlebell-shaped bread and therefore can hardly be interpreted as a symbol of Russian “roundness”; moreover, in Tolstoi’s novel, kalach is consistently associated with carnal sexuality, an unlikely parallel to metaphysical “Russianness.” To introduce artist Aubrey Beardsley as a “fin-de-siècle writer,” as Bowers does (153), is also quite imprecise.

Finally and delightfully, Caryl Emerson’s brief afterword brings the book to a most rewarding conclusion, thanks to conceptual insight, elegance of style and intellectual generosity, with which Emerson discusses the preceding chapters.