A compilation of extensive research by western and Russian scholars on verbal and visual representations of slavery, serfdom, and emancipated bondsmen, this volume will surely serve as a standard reference for students of comparative history. In each chapter, Bellows undertakes a context-sensitive contrast of two nations undergoing a similar radical social transformation. At the same time she is interested in identifying modes of cultural production that served analogous purposes in shaping the collective perception of emancipation and its consequences. The book's focus is on the agitated period of reforms and reconstruction, roughly 1861–1905, when each nation was attempting to absorb masses of former slaves and serfs into a refashioned social fabric. Each chapter concentrates on a medium of communication and traces its various effects on the public imagination of peasants and freed bondsmen in a modernizing society. Like any ambitious survey of comparable cultural processes, this volume has its limits as well as uses.

Although Russia had no organized abolitionist movement nor anything like the wide distribution of ex-slave narratives in America, Bellows points to a comparable “radical literature” in both countries before emancipation was achieved. Two major texts were, by far, most influential in stimulating abolitionist sentiment: Ivan Turgenev's Zapiski okhotnika and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in translation. Bellows, however, wants to draw attention to less remarked upon texts that “humanized” the oppressed. The result is an awkward pairing of disparate works by starkly different writers: the folk-inflected poetry of Nikolai Nekrasov; a fictional female slave narrative by a white author, Martha Griffin Browne; Aleksei Pisemskii's tragic play, Gor΄kaia sud΄ba; and Louisa May Alcott's stories of black soldiers. It is true that this assortment of texts exposes scenes of unmitigated suffering and stoic endurance, but the quality of empathy evoked varies widely. Pisemskii's drama is as likely to create an antipathy for peasant misogyny and honor codes as sympathy for cross-class romance.

The consequences of emancipation were different in each nation. In Russia, landowners lost power, status, and property while liberated serfs were burdened with redemption payments and possessed no political rights. In America (temporarily) ex-slaves became citizens with voting rights while Southern planters largely retained land, turning freedmen into sharecroppers or vagrants. Bellows aptly notes that the landholding class fabricated popular historical fiction to alleviate its own anxieties and protect its dominance. A similar genre of “plantation” romance promoted the virtues of manorial life and the natural docility of servants. For comparison, Bellows clusters together a quartet of Russian pomeshchiki writers with a pair of Southern scions, Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris. While it is true that their fiction induces nostalgia for a pre-modern gentility between masters and slaves, it also reveals a fear of shiftless masses. The American authors are fabricating an image of ex-slaves still fixed in their place, bonded to an agrarian landscape. The Russian writers, however, are embedding their ex-serfs deeply in a centuries-old culture of the narod.

The chapters on representations of peasants and black folk in visual culture are engaging and illustrative of an array of archetypes. In the later nineteenth century, there was an efflorescence of Russian painting and commercial art. Il΄ia Repin and fellow Peredvizhniki staged scores of exhibitions in the countryside, etching scenes of peasant labor and culture into the national identity. Depictions of slave markets and involuntary conscription added a critical edge to the bucolic landscape of rural Russia. In America, too, genre painters fashioned “ethnographic” scenes of black life, but always as exotica, chuzhoi. The emergence of Negro media and professional black artists and photographers gave a new dignity to black portraiture, sorely needed in a commercial Northern society in which Currier & Ives and Harper's Weekly disseminated lithographs of “Darktown” life.

The failure of Reconstruction and the impoverishment of Russia's agrarian economy led to a crisis of modernization. The turn of the century witnessed a mass exodus of peasants from villages and black migrants fleeing racist terror. The harsh contradiction between the “old order” and a “progressive” industrial economy was reflected in the images the culture generated. Bellows surveys the ads and ephemera of this new world, emphasizing the harsh satire directed against the “hooliganism” of new urban dwellers and the vicious demeaning of African Americans. The Machine had entered the garden and advertisers attempted to flatter and lure new recruits to the industrial army.

In this ambitious comparison of two divergent, but analogous societies, crucial distinctions are noted, but similarities lack nuance. There is a wealth of names, plot summaries, and informative data. The book is a dutiful read for reviewers, but for scholars a valuable resource.