This exhaustive volume represents a very significant contribution to the bibliography of Russian literary history from the medieval to the modern period. In its scope, conception and engagement with scholarship, this is the kind of account which comes along only once every generation, a work informed by the lifelong study of four preeminent scholars of Russian literature from both sides of the Atlantic. It provides a reassessment and a reevaluation of the history of Russian literature a generation after the fall of the Soviet Union, following the rise of the study of world literature, the ensuing interest in border crossing and diasporic communities, the decentering of the canon, and the efforts to include more diverse voices and communities into histories of literature. It also responds to a reframing of questions of literary history in the Slavic field that has resulted in a particular emphasis on institutional and cultural practices, on the history of theory, and on changing models of subjectivity. It is literary practices and institutional developments that are most central to the analysis in this volume. In the introduction, the authors present this emphasis as a contrast to the western liberal narrative of Russian literature that saw it as an “unofficial government”: “We see the literary field as a more flexible, capacious, and subtle discourse to organize the variables that contribute to the production of literature” (7). Their declared mission is to “trace the development of writing [from monastic centers] into popular, court, and secular literatures,” and to examine the role of salons, schools, and journals in shaping this process (7). A second important concentration of this volume is changing models of subjectivities over time, particularly as articulated through poetry. Poetry receives a particularly sustained focus here, most notably in the sections devoted to the eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

The volume is generally arranged chronologically by century into five parts, taking us from the medieval period to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which are combined. Individual chapters within each part are arranged thematically or generically. This allows some flexibility to flout chronological order, allowing, for instance, in the section on the nineteenth century, the discussion of the history of literary journals or of censorship within individual sections while moving fluidly backwards and forwards within the century. We thus find a section on Conceptualist poetry before a section on Isaac Babel΄. This flexibility towards chronology on a local level contributes to the volume's dynamism and willingness to resist kneejerk progressivism, thus reflecting in a certain sense one of the great recurring themes of modern Russian literature. As the work moves towards the modern age, canons form and disintegrate, writing and publishing practices branch out and become more complicated, and new contexts proliferate, meaning that writers such as Aleksandr Pushkin, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Anton Chekhov are dealt with repeatedly in different contexts. This means that the work functions uneasily as a quick reference source for a particular writer and instead invites a more sustained reading.

In the balance between providing a general picture and detailed analysis, the authors make liberal use of two modes of analysis: one is the case study, and the other is the keyword. Case studies are used particularly effectively, with some focusing on texts such as Afanasii Nikitin's Journey Across Three Seas, Archpriest Avvakum's Life, Nikolai Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler, Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace, Osip Mandel΄shtam's “I lost my way in the sky…,” Dmitrii Prigov's “Militsaner,” and Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line, while others focus on individual authors such as Nikolai Gogol΄, Nadezhda Durova, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Elena Shvarts, Elena Guro, Vladimir Nabokov, Liudmila Petrushevskaia, and Isaac Babel΄. Still others deal with genres or literary concepts such as seventeenth century dukhovnye stikhi, Horatian monument poems, the creation of modern prose, albums, and Realism/realism, while some discuss thematic, social, historical or literary-institutional phenomena such as duels, the narod, corporal punishment, and terrorism. Nineteenth century authors are represented particularly sparsely in the case studies, but perhaps this is partly an attempt to compensate for the over-representation of nineteenth century Russian novelists in previous histories of Russian literature. In most cases, these provide a substantive account that is more detailed than a literary encyclopedia entry but which remains accessible to the non-specialist. The keywords sections are more puzzling, covering such concepts as Baroque, Russian Classicism, sobornost΄, Romanticism, regional literature, and nihilism. These are shorter sections, more akin to encyclopedia entries. For concepts such as sobornost΄ and skaz, these sections are helpful for the general reader, but in other cases, such as Romanticism and nihilism, more contexts, examples, and critical discussion seem warranted in such a capacious volume as this. It is unclear why, for instance, Romanticism only merits a keyword, whereas Realism/realism merits a case study, or why regional literature would be a keyword rather than inviting a broader discussion and analysis.

While the coverage of the medieval period and seventeenth century is thorough and expansive, balancing accounts from the center and the periphery, offering new perspectives on a literary output that can seem dry and limited in comparison to what was being produced elsewhere in Europe, and focusing on such themes as “the trauma of invasion” (82), scribal culture and authorship, and Petrine fantasy fiction, it is in the section devoted to the eighteenth century that the volume's outstanding new contribution to the field begins to be felt. The chapter on poetics and subjectivities between classicism and Romanticism brings together a discussion of diary writing and the discovery of the language of human emotions with the development of Sentimentalism, analysis of the elegy in its many forms, and discussion of landscape poetry to show how eighteenth century Russian literature acquired and developed the forms and modes to express the increasingly complex vocabulary of emotion and feeling. The nineteenth century section recognizes the difficulties with demarcating the conceptual boundaries of the period, the most well-known age of Russian literature and the most frequently analyzed. A chapter on subjectivities provides a greater emphasis on poetry than is normally given in the context of the nineteenth century in histories of Russian literature, and helps to establish connections with the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most important contribution of this section is the balance it is able to maintain between the development and coalescing of literary forms such as the novel and the lyric and their simultaneous fragmentation, disintegration, and deformation. The paradoxes of literary and historical continuities and ruptures, engagement with and rejection of past models, and authors’ struggles with and attempts to reflect and model historical change are core to this section. The twentieth and twentieth-first centuries section recognizes the importance of 1917 as a historical rupture while at the same time recognizing thematic continuities across that historical divide, with sections devoted to institutions and the poetics of subjectivity, bringing together pre-and post-revolutionary themes and works. A section on misfits in Russian poetry servs as an interlude, and sections on innovations in prose and drama and catastrophic narratives provide a focus on revolutionary and post-revolutionary works. Another section on intelligentsia narratives brings us through the Soviet into the post-Soviet era.

The volume includes forty-four black and white illustrations and nineteen color plates, which both help to bring to life the more obscure periods of literary history, particularly the medieval period, and reinforce the importance of the visual in twentieth century Russian literature. The nineteenth century is represented by the least number of images, an editorial choice that unfortunately contributes to the general view of nineteenth century literature as being less engaged with the visual, a view recently challenged by work by Molly Brunson and others.

The authors have been extraordinarily thorough throughout in their generous engagement with the scholarship and secondary literature in both Russian and English. Important recent work in all periods is well-represented, and readers can easily find directions to works providing more extensive analysis. The index is wide-ranging enough to cover all but the most specialized topics. This volume will be tremendously useful for scholars and students alike, given that it provides the possibility of finding in one place both the general features and outline of Russian literary history of all periods and particular and more detailed information about genres, authors, cultural practices, theoretical and critical terms, literary debates, and so on. It will inevitably feature in the comprehensive exam lists of all graduate students of Russian literature. At the same time, it is readable and engaging enough to attract a more general audience looking for an overview of Russian literary history. In the short but rich introduction, the authors ask whether twenty-first century readers still need histories of national literatures in this age of obsession with global networks. Judging by this volume, the answer is a resounding yes.