For a number of years now, Brian James Baer has been a leader of efforts to integrate translation studies into Russian and Slavic literary studies, advancing work on multiple fronts. The volume under review aims to “show what is gained by fully integrating ‘the problematics of translation’ & into the study of literature and culture” (16), and “generate discussion of how to denationalize literary studies by recognizing the constitutive role of translation in the making of modern literatures” (20). It does so through a series of case studies ranging from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century that examine translation broadly, analyzing everything from actual translations into Russian, discourse on translation, and the para-textual packaging of translated literature, to literary representations of translation, of mistranslation, and of translators. More comprehensive histories that examine how Russian literature has been formed through translation remain to be desired, along with additional in-depth case studies that together would enable instructors to integrate translated literature into courses on Russian literature. The advantage of Baer’s approach here is that it offers rereadings of canonical literary works and popular works in which the Romantic national framing of literary studies is exposed, deliberately mystifying its own origins in translational and intercultural exchange, and shown to be inadequate to the problems of multilingualism, subjectivity, and identity engaged by Russian literature, enabling a decentering of the usual narratives of national literary development.

Baer thus succeeds in achieving his goals, cited above, not through a sustained critique but through a variety of approaches and readings of a wide range of material. There is not a continuous narrative arc to the volume, nor a conclusion to the volume as a whole; rather, each chapter stands as an independent intervention that demonstrates the gain from considering the problem of translation. The chapters include an examination of the Decembrists as an interpretive community and forerunners to the Russian intelligentsia through their poetic translations; analysis of scenes of mistranslation in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Felix Roziner’s A Certain Finkelmeyer that highlight tensions between national and imperial identities; an inventive reading of Freudian slips through interlingual homonymy in Dostoevsky’s “The Peasant Marei” and Fazil Iskander’s “Pshada” diagnosed as a forgetting of the complexity of Russian and Soviet national and imperial identity; an examination of fictional characters who are translators in Fedor Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia’s The Boarding School Girl, Nina Gabrilyan’s “Master of the Grass,” and Aleksandra Marinina’s The Stylist that shows how these texts critique (Dostoevskii) and deconstruct the typical Romantic, western, gendered metaphorics of translation; a reexamination of the Soviet School of Translation that sees its defining trait as an embrace of a “ritual purging of individualism” (129) that was promoted by the state and embraced by the oppositional intelligentsia; a subtle examination of the reception of the very popular Oscar Wilde in Russia and how para-textual packaging serves to create Wilde as a suffering artist, rather than a gay writer; and finally a counter-interpretation to the reception of Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Daniel Stein, Interpreter: A Novel in Documents as a quintessentially postmodern text promoting hybrid identities and tolerance that examines the limits to this tolerance in the novel’s homosexual thematics.

As this quick summary can only suggest, there are challenging and sophisticated interpretive insights at every turn, and a sustained engagement with the problematic Romantic national literary paradigm, particularly as it applies to the hierarchical binaries of original/translation and author/translator. Baer examines relevant alternatives, like the concept of imitatio and the deconstruction of these binaries offered by Russian writers. He also continually takes seriously the Russian discourses that project a Russian identity that is alternate or opposed to the west, and in the process sometimes reveals the difficulty of maintaining a critical discourse that is opposed to the essentialist vision of monolithic cultures and attempts to account for cultural difference, when such difference is often projected against a monolithically conceived other. So, for example, while he begins the chapter on Wilde by discussing the general problems involved in the translation of homosexually-themed literature by examples of translations between English and French (demonstrating diversity within western European cultures), the chapter as a whole examines the reception of “western gay literature” in Russia. Baer concludes the chapter with an exemplary refusal to prefer the gay packaging of Wilde in Anglo-American criticism to the Russian version of the suffering artist, but one wishes this respect for cultural difference and specificity could have also been deployed to critique the Russian discourse on the unitary west.