Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol frame their excellent new volume of collected essays as a bold call to arms for a “new research paradigm” for the study of socialist realism in east central Europe. Dobrenko (known for his pioneering studies of Soviet literature) and Jonsson-Skradol challenge the received knowledge, which they see as obsessed with two sets of binaries that defined our understanding of east central European cultural life: one between “uniformity” or “diversity,” and the other between Soviet “imposition” or “indigenous development.” “What if,” the editors ask, it is “both the one and the other? What if the four practices were equally indispensable for the functioning of the system?” (1). They see cultural “Sovietization” of various east European countries as “a give and take, a response to the local conditions, an acceptance of the necessity to have the originally inflexible theory accommodate the daily reality of an unfamiliar country, language and culture” (2). The result of their effort is a stimulating volume rich in diverse case studies and surprising turns.

The contributors (most of whom also participated in two conferences organized by Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol at the University of Sheffield) underscore how negotiated and incomplete literary Sovietization was. Arguably, “negotiation” is the catchword of revisionist histories that focus on imperial failures by zooming closer in; these authors, however, also achieve new insights through their sustained focus on the relationship between east European socialist realism and various national literatures before the war. As Hans Günther remarks in his panoramic essay on the end of socialist realism in eastern Europe, “unfortunately, Eastern Europe became acquainted with the doctrine of socialist realism just at its worst point, when the Soviet canon had narrowed down to a mere instrument of exclusion and prohibitions” (18). This conclusion feels a bit fatalistic for an opening essay, but it maps out accurately point A and point B of the story; the ensuing essays explore the various, often twisted, paths and alternative routes along the way.

Thus, Pavel Janáček examines pre-WWII Czechoslovak censorship (liberal and authoritarian alike), arguing provocatively that considering these earlier traditions helps better understand a certain appeal of Stalinist censorship. Anne Hartmann shows that a genuine desire to revitalize German culture drove the short-lived efforts by Soviet cultural officers in Germany's Soviet Zone. Imre Józef Balázs challenges the tendency to view socialist realist decades in Romania and Hungary as interruptions; engaging with social history, he sees these writings as a result of “the emergence of new elite groups and literary practices which were hostile towards previously dominant groups and old hierarchies” (148). Tatiana Volokitina explores the counterintuitive (given their close historical and cultural ties) tensions between Soviet and Bulgarian literary establishments. Tamás Scheibner examines the role of the philosopher György Lucács in Hungary's divided cultural landscape of the 1940s, while tracing the accompanying schisms to the 1930s. Illuminating are two discussions of east European translations in the USSR: one in Rossen Djagalov's essay on the creation of what he calls “a People's Republic of Letters;” the other in Evgeny Ponomarev's piece on “the inclusion of Eastern European literatures into the Soviet literary sphere” (295). This question of translations as either reverse cultural influence or a privilege enjoyed by east European writers is important: it suggests that “Sovietization,” however subtly understood, may be too narrow of a concept for understanding fully the range of movements and circulations that defined the Soviet-east European cultural relations after World War II.

The volume's great value derives partly from that it brings together, in English, so many experts specializing in literatures from an array of European states. Perhaps including more statistical information about international literary contacts and circulations would have been a good way to strengthen some authors’ claims (such as Ponomarev's assertion on page 295 that the “re-export” of socialist realism from eastern Europe to the USSR “proved a successful endeavor”). Still, this broadly-conceived, innovative, and nicely edited volume represents interdisciplinary scholarship at its best. It is to be expected that this book will become a major landmark in the ongoing efforts to re-think the cultural relations in communist eastern Europe, and an important step forward towards a more synthetic history hopefully to appear in the years to come.