Exploring the tension and interaction between the voice as a natural, bodily phenomenon, and a cultural, artificial, manufactured product, this book displays enormous scope and ambition, tracing how the human voice has been conceived of, represented, and reproduced across the media of literature, theatre, opera, radio, political oratory, film, and even television over the last two hundred years. As if this task were not enough, Bulgakova does not limit her focus to Russia, but considers western Europe, especially Germany, and the USA. In covering this vast intellectual and physical territory, Golos kak kul΄turnyi fenomen encompasses insights and information of interest to a range of scholars.

Bulgakova’s book shows how the associations of different voices change over time, due to shifting social and gender attitudes. Moreover, the voice’s inherent natural-artificial tension is transformed by sound amplification and recording. Illustrating this unremarkable thesis involves many digressions into a variety of topics: one section traces the rising culture of public poetry readings in the 1880s, and of political speakers, before tracing the Russian Symbolist poets’ reaction against notions of the natural voice in favor of the heightened artificiality of recitals in a near whisper, exemplified by the passionless voice of Aleksandr Blok. The vitality of Futurist poet Vladimir Maiakovskii’s booming bass was a reaction precisely to such lifelessness. In both cases, the voice was central to the poet’s image, and in both cases it was not a natural given, but a deliberate construction.

Recording technologies for sound meant the separate recording of voice and images, the disembodying of sound, and the strangely phantom-like presence of early silent cinema images famously described by Maksim Gor΄kii. Yet, argues Bulgakova, over time attitudes toward disembodied voices change: whereas in Symbolist Andrei Belyi’s 1916 novel Peterburg, the voice alienated from the body was perceived as hallucinatory and diabolic, subsequently, we have become unable to distinguish natural from artificial, a thesis illustrated by a disquisition on the voice of robots in the Star Wars films.

Examples from beyond Russia and Germany, such as Star Wars, are generally less nuanced and less successful than those from Russia. The book’s strongest passages discuss media, especially film, in the Soviet Union, where Bulgakova traces the interaction between technical and political dimensions of the shift to sound, and the push to unify accents and voice in multi-ethnic USSR. This is done very effectively in the newsreel voice of Iurii Levitan, whose slow, low enunciation is explained by the demands of microphones of the 1930s and 1940s. Other factors of 1930s film, such as the importance of music, are also attributed to technology in a way that is more convincing than previously, but is nevertheless undermined by a failure to build on the insights of numerous English-language sources on sound in the 1930s such as Lilya Kaganovsky, Stephen Lowell, and Emma Widdis, even if some of these scholars’ works, and some in German and French, are mentioned.

One of the most successful sections of the book was a discussion of how sound moved away from its music orientation and how voices changed in the 1960s, including Lenin’s voice, for example in the re-editings of Stalin-era Lenin films. In these and other restorations of earlier films, Bulgakova argues that we hear the clash of two different cultures: the recording of sound and voices.

A discussion of the changes in 1960s voices, however, then leads to an extended Innokentii Smoktunovskii-Marlon Brando comparison that was not so enlightening. Evidently, the intention in framing the pool of examples so widely was so that the primary focus of Russia and film could be enriched and nuanced by the wider consideration of Russian traditions of the voice alongside international ones, and the cinematic voice alongside that in other media. However, this overall structural conceit did not work, and all too often the search for a wider context and parallels lapse into lengthy sections with their own logic, encumbered by long quotations such that the reader forgets the central point being made. This illustrative tendency, and lack of narrative or polemic cohesion, means that this is not a book to be read all the way through by anyone other than reviewers. Instead, it should be read selectively, using its index, according to the reader’s specific needs.