This is an impressive book. In Golos i vosk, Valerii Zolotukhin draws from over a decade of research to expand the boundaries of philological history. He does so by situating his path-breaking subjects—a group of theater directors, linguists, poets, actors, and literary critics—within the orbit of various instantiations and offshoots of the Institute of the Living Word, which has received increasing attention in scholarship on Russian and Soviet modernism in recent years. Zolotukhin frames his study with an old question, newly adapted to the twenty-first century: what does it mean to study the “living word” in today’s environment, which is increasingly saturated with new media forms?

At first, Zolotukhin tells the reader that an answer requires a new definition of what sound recording was, is, and could be. For him, it is not only a tool for literary study, but a way of thinking that alters the study and mediation of the word as such. He argues that the history of sound recording can foster new “consideration of performative practices,” ending the sentence with the expansive rejoinder of “and not only these.” That last phrase hints at the capacious scope of this book, and of Zolotukhin’s broader scholarly project, which he describes in interviews as an attempt to trace the gradual separation of the body and the voice in Russian culture.

The book thus does less work to grow or challenge the literary or theatrical canon (there are almost no readings of literary texts here) than it tries to enact a parallel, philological history of the bombastic leaps forward we know well from Vladimir Maiakovskii, now re-situated among the granular work of critics and linguists who were radically expanding their toolboxes. Zolotukhin’s central suggestion is that we have overlooked the centrality of performance, a word that does not usually appear in studies of this kind in the Slavic field. At the heart of this book is an attempt at forging a new critical vocabulary and metalanguage to talk about the significance of sound in literary performance and, increasingly, in literature on the page.

The chapters proceed chronologically. Chapter 1 makes crucial connections between the performative culture of Russian symbolism and an eventual, formalist fixation on the spoken word. Chapter 2 contextualizes the short-lived Institute of the Living Word as a turning point in cultural responses to speech, declamation, and performance, particularly crediting the advent of sound recording. Chapter 3 is probably the most interesting in the book, exploring how performers and directors in the theater fundamentally changed their attitudes towards sound, speech, and performance thanks to what was transpiring in smaller linguistic circles.

Then, the book shifts. Returning to a promise made in Ch. 2, Ch. 4 attempts to demonstrate that sound recording was the central catalyst for the linguist Sergei Bernshtein, who organized research conducted at the Institute. Chapter 5 uses the curious case of Vsevlolod Meierholʹd’s Revizor—for which some segments were recorded—as another example of sound recording’s influence. The final chapter essentially turns the preceding book on its head, offering a cultural account for the recent recentering of audio recordings, and particularly their proliferation on the Russian internet.

This powerfully crafted argument accumulates ideas, texts, observations, and claims without ever slowing down (or looking back, for that matter). A question for any study like this asks how Zolotukhin manages the creeping determinism of arguments about technology. The results are somewhat mixed: at one moment, Zolotukhin suggests that Bernshstein’s recordings were saved only after they were linked with performances by Vladimir Maiakovskii, thus elevating the role of cultural attitudes in this story, but somewhat muddling the argument about sound recording’s importance. Like a recording device, Zolotukhin sometimes reproduces the words of his subjects in lengthy and uninterrupted block citations that span several pages of the book at a time. Given the precision and care that characterizes Zolotukhin’s research, I was curious about the author’s own feelings about the ideas he quotes at length, but such responses are hard to detect. Recent books from Isobel Palmer and Ana Olenina have dug into the same texts, but have contextualized and commented on these advancements in a more critical way.

Nevertheless, Zolotukhin’s book will certainly become a cornerstone of any future studies of sound recording in Russian and Soviet modernism, and it clearly succeeds in expanding the scope of what constitutes philology in the present moment in Slavic studies. We should applaud his truly boundary-expanding work, and look to this study as a model for what the future of our field could look like.