The book under review marks the first publication of Lev Losev’s PhD dissertation (University of Michigan, 1981) in its original Russian. A preeminent cultural figure—poet, critic, translator, memoirist, and biographer—the then thirty-nine-year-old Losev rose to the challenge of systematizing the art of Aesopian writing that was ubiquitous in Russian literary history. Infusing the extensive education and experience he gained before emigrating from the Soviet Union with thinking advanced by leading Western literary theorists of the time, Losev focused on Aesopian language (henceforth AL) in Soviet literature. The result was a pathbreaking systematization of an understudied literary phenomenon that persists in repressive sociopolitical and cultural conditions.

Losev’s intent, as he explains, is to study AL as a dynamic literary system. Accordingly, the first part of the book develops a coherent, non-reductive theoretical framework that accounts for the fluidity of AL and the variety of its instantiations. The second part presents case studies that show Losev’s theoretical constructs in action. In the Introduction, which lays the groundwork for his inquiry, Losev states his ethical decision to draw examples exclusively from works whose authors have already died, emigrated, suffered official chastisement, or recanted so as to forestall reprisals by Soviet authorities like those some western scholarship precipitated. He proceeds in Ch. 2, “The Aesthetic Nature of Aesopic Language,” and in Ch. 3, “A Typology of Aesopian Means,” to ground AL theoretically. Central to this enterprise is his mapping of the author-reader-censor relationship and the precarious duality it entails as the author creates “markers” that prompt reading between the lines and erects “screens” to distract the censor from these markers and the concealed material they indicate. The degree to which cultural and sociopolitical climates affect receptivity to AL add to its uncertainties: repressive conditions heighten perception of encoded messages while more liberal conditions dull sensitivity to them. Balancing this instability is the consistency of means that authors use to generate screens and markers. Losev’s typology systematizes an array of devices characteristic of Aesopian writings that function at semantic, stylistic, and generic levels.

In the second part of the book, Losev applies his theoretical constructs, showing how AL can itself affect the textual, stylistic, and generic features on which it draws for sustenance. Chapter 4, “AL and the Stratification of the Text,” centers on Evgenii Shvarts’s 1943 play Drakon while Ch. 5, “AL and the Formation of Individual Style” engages Evgenii Evtushenko’s 1969 poetry collection Idut belye snegi. Here Losev includes performance. Chapter 6, “AL as a Factor in the Formation of Literary Genre (from the History of Children’s Literature),” turns to a genre whose playfulness and naiveté make it ideal for Aesopian encoding. In his “Conclusion: And What Do We Need AL for?” Losev reflects on the broader literary contexts in which this phenomenon operates, considering its ties to other forms of writing and positioning his work more broadly within cultural studies. The book closes with a Bibliography and Appendixes: an annotated chart elucidating “Filters of ideological censorship” and the texts of Evgenii Markin’s poems “Belyi baken” and “Nevesomost´.”

This publication of Losev’s dissertation trails far behind its appearance in Jane Bobko’s translation On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature in 1984 (ed. Wolfgang Kasack, Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner), which is available online. This seeming belatedness is addressed implicitly in the introductory article “Sovetskie tainye iazyki” subtitled “Predislovie k predisloviiu” (6–48) by anthropologist and folklorist Aleksandra Arkhipova, who prepared the volume under review for publication. Arkhipova extends Losev’s study of literary AL into the everyday reality of repressive conditions in pre-Soviet, Soviet, and post-Soviet times to show it thriving—orally and in writing—in broad swatches of the population, occupied territories, military zones, prisons, and among Ostarbeiter. Noting the dearth of studies of AL in the Soviet period and the growing interest in AL in Russia today (10), Arkhipova indicates the timeliness of Losev’s exploration of this “sad Russian invention” (18) that protests against oppression and fosters a “union of the weak” (16). Arkhipova, whose own status as a foreign agent in the eyes of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of Justice is noted three times in the book, left Russia in the aftermath of studying terminology employed by the regime to describe military action in Ukraine. The transfer value of Losev’s work to other periods, cultures, and disciplines argues eloquently for the relevance of this publication.