For most scholars of Russian literary and cultural history, the first set of associations with the Italian commedia dell'arte tradition relate to modernism: from conspicuous examples, such as Aleksandr Blok's Balaganchik, to subtle references as in Belyi's Petersburg (the terrorist Lippanchenko is likened to a hunchback Pierrot), the commedia dell'arte stock characters populate modernist plays, paintings, poems, and works of prose. While the Silver Age's engagement with figures from commedia dell'arte is well studied, until now there has been virtually no consideration of how this vital genre of improvisational performance art ramified in earlier and later periods of Russian culture. Olga Partan's Vagabonding Masks remedies this scholarly lacuna by tracing the history of the Italian theatrical tradition in Russia starting in the early eighteenth century and extending up to the present moment. In her chronologically-organized study, Partan offers new insights into the commedia dell'arte’s deep imprimatur on three hundred years of Russian culture.

Methodologically, the book draws on the Russian formalist approaches of Yurii Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin. Finding parallels between Bakhtin's theorization of carnival and her study of the transposition of commedia dell'arte characters, themes, and style into non-performance based art forms such as literature and painting, Partan proposes a new concept: “harliquinization.” She defines “harlequinized art and literature” as works containing core elements of commedia dell'arte: “the masked character; improvisation within a set scenario or plot; the extensive use of grotesque imagery, plasticity, exaggeration, and self-parody; and the presence of doubles and mistaken identities” (17). Partan writes of “harlequinized characters” such as jesters (44); a “harlequinized element” of a play (using a prop weapon as a symbol of male sexuality) (106); “Sumarokov's harlequinized comedy” (113), which paradoxically lacks many of the traits of commedia; “harlequinized imagery” (116) such as the use of the Harlequin character in plays and the donning of Harlequin costumes at masquerade balls; “a harlequinized prism” through which to read Vladimir Nabokov's novel Look at the Harlequins! (218); “harlequinized attributes—the pair of harlequin sunglasses (akin to a mask) and golden pencil (a miniature lath and Harlequin's magical stick)” (235); and Alla Pugacheva's “four-decades-long harlequinized reign on the throne of Russian popular culture” (240). Given the variety of ways a creative work can be “harlequinized,” and the perplexing use of the term to characterize her own critical reading lens and Pugacheva's period of sustained cultural popularity, this reader would have found it helpful if the analytical apparatus had been developed more rigorously and applied more methodically throughout the book. For instance, the author might have categorized the commedia's core elements and given each category a short name (along the lines of “characters,” “improvisation,” “style,” and “scenarios”) and invoked a specific category in regard to each case study of harlequinization in order to help her readers better grasp which aspect(s) of the tradition she was identifying as relevant.

The book's most exciting chapters are also the least expected: one on the commedia dell'arte's presence in Nikolai Gogol΄’s The Overcoat; and the other on the jester-like persona of songstress Alla Pugacheva. While the chapter on The Overcoat mines Gogol΄’s biography and correspondence for evidence to support the textual analysis, the one on Pugacheva reads her public persona as a tragicomic performative construct. Partan's case studies, in which she applies her concept of harlequinization to subject matter ranging from literary text to self-stylization, illuminate the remarkable extent to which the commedia dell'arte tradition reverberates in Russian culture.

Vagabonding Masks will appeal to scholars and students working in the fields of literature, cultural studies, cultural history, and performance studies. The book's prose is cogent albeit redundant at times (for example, the phrase, “vagabonding the roads of Russian culture” or a close variant appears on pages 13, 19, 163, and 246). The copy editor would have done well to remedy this, as well as other minor flaws such as the missing page number in footnote 24 (170), and the inconsistent application of the Library of Congress transliteration system (249). These trifling infelicities aside, Olga Partan's impressive work of scholarship reveals a much fuller picture of the harlequinade's impact in Russia and gives us a “harlequinizing lens” for reading other case studies on our own.