At its heart, this is a book about conversations. The conversation between the eleven contributors all tasked with engaging with certain aspects of historical poetics. The conversation between thinkers of the 1890s–1970s working to articulate theories of genre and strategies for incorporating contextual and historical phenomena into the study of literature. The conversation between authors and the whole literary tradition that preceded them. These are productive, compelling, and often illuminating conversations that give this collection a fairly clear sense of purpose and cohesion. Its goal is to present a constellation of ideas around the notion of historical poetics and then turn them over to contemporary scholars (Slavists, comparativists, and classicists) who put them through their paces. To this end, the volume includes new translations of notable essays by Alexander Veselovsky (the book’s leading man), Olga Freidenberg, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Mikhail Gasparov (featured in seminal supporting roles), interspersed with the new pieces. While the contemporary chapters vary in the degree of their engagement with the essays that set off each section—some use a specific concept from the essay as a jumping off point for a new analysis while others are more extended interrogations and applications of the theories—they all show how these ideas can be mobilized and incorporated into serious literary scholarship.

The crux of this book is the hybrid notion of historical poetics. It begins its “exploration” of this concept with a two-pronged explanation. The editors’ introduction identifies the key concepts and makes steps in contextualizing them in both older and more recent approaches to literary theory. “It is perhaps a timely reminder that the original deployment of the modern term ‘poetics’ occurred in the phrase ‘Historical Poetics’ & Veselovsky understood poetics as a historical and comparative discipline & The result was a new kind of literary history—one that focused not on authors or poetic schools, but on the evolution of literary forms—as well as a new kind of historicism that considers the literary domain within the unity of a historically specific culture, and beyond, within a global network of dialogically-interlinked cultures” (21). This type of broad synthesis is complemented with Veselovsky’s own explications of the concept in his Introduction to Historical Poetics—Chapter 1 of the collection. Together, these opening pieces establish a running dialogue between 1894 and 2016 and set-up the multivalent use of key terms for both contexts. The chapters that follow tend to focus on one or two of these terms and appropriate them into the author’s own interests and work. What emerges is a thorough and dynamic engagement with rich ideas such as memory, history, genre, oblivion/resurrection/survival, non-synchronicity, the longue durée, and poetics.

The book’s chapters all perform the juggling act required of them admirably well. They balance discussions of established concepts and the translated essays with new applications and serious contributions to the author’s own field. They pick up the thread of the book’s exploration of historical poetics without losing sight of their specific textual, cultural, or theoretical concerns. This works because these chapters are all founded on solid and erudite close readings. The texts being read vary enormously—from Pindar (Leslie Kurke) to Homer (Faraone) to Dostoevskii (Kate Holland); from Veselovsky (Somoff and Maslov) to Bakhtin (Kliger and Bird) to Freidenberg (Martin); from the kurgans of Vshchizh (Kunichika) to the inner life of Vasilii Zhukovskii (Vinitsky). Yet, they all serve as the core of the type of “reinvigoration” (21) and “re-articulation” (70) of literary studies for which the volume strives.

The chapters wisely situate historical poetics in other theoretical contexts, most commonly Russian Formalism, Russian Structuralism, and New Historicism. Leslie Kurke offers a brilliant single-paragraph discussion of New Historicism and Historical Poetics (immediately preceded by Victoria Somoff’s very successful extended attempt to deploy both simultaneously). Nina Braginskaya shows how the blending of the work of semioticians such as Iurii Lotman, historical poetics, and her own conceptual awareness of scholarly methodology can produce sharp discussions of the historical, cultural, and literary contexts of a text. Moreover, the presence of Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynianov can be felt throughout the chapters, but most particularly in discussions of the persistence/evolution of literary forms.

Strong individual moments stand out in this collection—Michael Kunichika’s excellent application of Veselovsky’s notions of memory and oblivion as a tool for cultural analysis and Robert Bird’s compelling claim that Bakhtin’s work on satire functions best as a model that “capture[s] and produce[s] material forms of cultural imagination” (432). Two chapters, however, are especially worth noting. Leslie Kurke and Ilya Vinitsky both clearly utilize aspects of historical poetics, but more implicitly than explicitly. An understanding of historicist readings frames Kurke’s discussion of the eleventh Pythian ode and its relationship to the Oresteia. Her reading frequently zooms in to give microscopically close readings of the texts while maintaining a consideration of “typology and comparison across cultural and literary systems” (113) that is a function of the longue durée. Vinitsky similarly uses a Veselovskian construct as the leaping off point for his investigation of “how ‘biography’ communicated with ‘literature’ at the dawn of the Romantic era in Russia” (318). In presenting the biography of Zhukovskii, he uses the poet’s emotional life to make bold claims about the evolution of an entire literary tradition.

These chapters are representative of the virtues of a volume that has no qualms about offering a dense and serious engagement with literature. They balance broad historical perception with nuanced interpretations. The editors and authors are astute and dedicated proponents of philology, of the capacity of the scholar to know the complexities of literature, history, and life. They are acutely aware of the persistence of fundamental cultural and artistic qualities that transcend national, linguistic, and even temporal boundaries. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, the philologist’s duty is to preserve these phenomena by holding back the forces of forgetting and oblivion.