José Vergara's study makes a compelling case for persistent attention to the legacy of James Joyce within Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “Russian literature” here figures in its multiple valences—pre-Stalinist Soviet, émigré, post-Thaw Soviet, and post-Soviet—in a series of case studies in intertextual influence whose theoretical framework derives principally from Harold Bloom's notion of the “anxiety of influence.” What Vergara convincingly shows is that for Russian writers in the twentieth century, Joyce figured as the pre-eminent modernist writer of prose, the standard to emulate, adapt, or rebel against. He “permeated the air of the time” (17) in the 1920s before becoming a figure writers were obliged to condemn then, essentially, “anathema” (73) in the Stalin era—only to resurface as a distant memory of modernist freedoms in the Thaw-era's atmosphere of partial rehabilitation.

Vergara traces an abundance of reverberating Joycean motifs in Russian texts, but ultimately finds the central thread for his inquiry in the overtly Bloomian theme of fathers (he avoids the simplistic Freudian connotations), which appears in Joyce's own Ulysses in Stephen's project for rejecting his biological patrimony in order to create himself as a writer descended more essentially from Shakespeare. In the case of Yuri Olesha's Envy, Vergara finds the work's obsession with the themes of food, sex, and death to coalesce around a response to Joyce's Ulysses, which comes to Olesha's service as he navigates ambivalently among nostalgia for a literary past, intimations of mortality, and the emerging claims in his culture for “the Soviet non-biological family” (36). A still more obvious interlocutor with Joyce is Vladimir Nabokov, who actually met Joyce in Paris in the 1930s and, as Vergara argues, competed with him as a writer. Both The Gift and Bend Sinister portray poignant father-son relations, which Nabokov uses to “correct” (46) Joyce's aim to reject biology and create an aesthetic paternity by simultaneously imagining the resurrection of Nabokov's own murdered father and merge his memory with that of Aleksandr Pushkin, his adopted father within Russian literature (50).

Andrei Bitov's underground novel of the Brezhnev era, The Pushkin House, self-consciously parades its literary allusions, among them to Joyce. But it, too, is a novel about imagined alternative paternity for its hero Leva Odoevtsev. It thus serves as part of its author's “effort to discover a means out of his perceived historical belatedness” (75), a predicament experienced by the post-Thaw generation for whom Joyce became emblematic of their “inability to catch up” with literary history (93). Sasha Sokolov, another underground writer of the Brezhnev years, marks an advance in confidence of Russian appropriations of Joyce. In School for Fools and Between Dog and Wolf, whose complex prose replicates Joycean devices like stream of consciousness narration and quasi-epic lists, Joyce figures primarily as a stylistic alternative (108), a precedent for taking pleasure in “freedom language provides” (118). In Vergara's argument, Sokolov goes even further than Joyce in relinquishing any anxiety over the relation between linguistic play and reality (120)—albeit as an implicit escape from the demands of Socialist Realism, a parallel, he suggests, to Joyce's ambivalence regarding the colonial implications of using English in an Irish novel (128).

For Mikhail Shishkin, a post-Soviet writer able by choice to reside in Switzerland, the engagement with Joyce unfolds at a time of rekindled debates over whether a western writer like Joyce is essential to Russian literature, or “totally foreign, unnecessary” (142). Shishkin's novel Maidenhair, Vergara argues, turns to the precedent of Joycean verbal play and recycled texts in order to come “out the other side of the end of history to put the pieces together and to reintegrate Russian literature into world culture” (144). The book's conclusion presents results of a series of interviews Vergara conducted with sixteen contemporary writers about Joyce's influence on their work.

Vergara's tight focus on a single literary predecessor creates some inevitable blind spots. At times one senses that not all the textual traces he notes necessarily point back to Joyce but could, rather, emerge out of a common stock of modernist themes and motifs. The readings are nonetheless conducted with subtlety and insight, and Vergara's book ultimately can be read as a study of Russian writers’ enduring engagement with western modernism over the course of the twentieth century, and beyond.