The title of the work under review includes two singular nouns, the first a common noun and the second a proper one: “History” and “Russian Literature.” The usual business of the proper noun, when applied to an abstraction, is reification. The reader of this title anticipates a “new” account of the development over time of a unique entity, Russian literature, in the tradition of many preceding accounts, including that of the “old” Cambridge History of Russian Literature, published in 1989 and edited by Charles A. Moser. Presumably, it was that precedent, as well as the demands of the publisher’s marketing department, that resulted in this choice of title.

However, to the credit of its editors and authorial collective, inside the covers of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, one finds a multiplicity of alternate histories that works against reification, unsettling any notion of a singular and well-defined literature of Russia, unfolding across time and space in regular fashion. How, first of all, could one locate the proper geographical boundaries of a uniquely defined Russian literary tradition? As the editors explain in the introduction, literature written in Russian has never been confined to Russian territory alone, and, given the movements of borders and populations over centuries of imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet history, how might one define “Russian territory” in the first place? As successive media revolutions, from the printing press onward, have increasingly enabled the movement of texts across geography, literature originating in far flung locations across the globe has played an increasingly important role in the Russian literary system (7–10). As a language of empire, Russian-language literature has been created and consumed by members of many ethnic and national formations, in many locations beyond the boundaries of Russia, proper, however one defines them. While the volume is focused on literature and literary institutions centered on the institutions and histories of the Russian political and geographical core, it ranges across these many other sites of literary life and productively interrogates the hierarchies that structure this broad and variegated geography.

So much for space. What of time? In decades past, many, perhaps most specialists in Russian writing considered its earliest history to date to the mythic era of the Christianization of Kievan Rusʹ at the end of the tenth century. This is indeed where the 1989 Cambridge History of Russian Literature begins its account. However, as the editors of the volume under review explain, “the period of early Rus—from the turn of the eleventh century until roughly the Mongol conquest of the mid-thirteenth century—is the shared prehistory of the three modern East Slavic languages and cultures: Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian” (10). In recognition of this, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature focuses on literary traditions commencing in the principality of Muscovy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Still, in recognition of the debts of Muscovite and later Russian literary culture to earlier periods, the volume includes some discussion of those prehistories. In time, as in space, the boundaries of this volume’s object of study are blurry and porous.

Turning our attention from the limits to the core of the matter, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature presents readers with not one but four trajectories through time, arranged in the volume’s four parts, bringing together chapters written by 34 authors. The first part is dedicated to “Movements” and presents a mostly familiar sequence of chapters extending from Simon Franklin’s “The Age of Devotion” through many stages to Marijeta Bozovic’s “Contemporary Movements.” The chapters of the second part, “Mechanisms,” treat literary and social institutions, such as “The Censor” by Polly Jones, and “The Court” by Alexei Evstratov, yet also other social-historical categories, such as “Queerness” by Evgenii Bershtein. Part Three presents a sequence of “Forms,” from “Verse” (in two chapters, one by Michael Wachtel and the other by Isobel Palmer) to “Self-Writing,” by Emily Van Buskirk. The final Part, “Heroes” covers literary protagonists and types, from Tatiana Smoliarova’s “The Ruler” and Cathy Popkin’s “the Lowly Civil Servant” to Rebecca Reich’s “The Madman.” Extending the work of the chapters, a panoply of micro-essays, styled as “Boxes,” are devoted to “Close Readings,” “Genres,” “Places,” “Narrative Voices,” “Critical Frames,” and “Literature Beyond Literature” (this last, more opaque moniker referring to literature’s linkages with the other arts).

Yet “four historical trajectories” does not quite account for the complex representation of history in this volume. With its innovative structure, somewhere between the genres of historical reference work and encyclopedia, the volume in fact presents many more historical accounts. For chapters not covering a temporally circumscribed movement or mechanism, per se, authors were instructed to address both the entire arc of relevant history and to concentrate their inquiry around a specific, more crucial period. And so, for instance, Lyudmila Parts’s chapter on “The Short Story” reaches from the end of the eighteenth century to the present, but zooms in on Anton Chekhov and his legacy in immediately subsequent generations. Bradley Gorski’s chapter “The Market” briefly describes nineteenth-century and Soviet developments, but focuses on the post-Soviet reemergence of capitalist markets. In consequence, the volume’s web of accounts and trajectories through time and space is extraordinarily capacious, encountering the same moments, figures, topics, and works from multiple distinct angles of vision, buttressed by essentially distinct scholarly methodologies that arise from distinct kinds of inquiry from the study of institutions, gender studies, and media studies, to poetics, close reading, literary history, and more.

Any authoritative reference work of nationally or linguistically defined literary history inevitably centers attention on some figures, works, or movements and deemphasizes or passes over others. This volume is no different. Yet here, this relative privileging of topics emerges not as the recognition granted by a single, authoritative narrative voice, but in the form of repeat mentions among many voices in conversation. Aleskandr Pushkin, who occupies nearly a complete page of the index, is a leitmotif, rather than a unifying central theme or the subject of a chapter in his own right. The Soviet playwright Nikolai Pogodin, mentioned on three pages, is a minor variation. In yet another departure from the precedent of the 1989 work, contributors to The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature range in career stage from Assistant Professors to Emeritus professors. This renders the volume’s collective organization and assessment of a shared field of inquiry the representation of a transgenerational scholarly collaboration. It is a snapshot of the central concerns and scholarly methods of the present moment across a discipline.

The volume’s strategy of distributed authority opens topics to inquiry in distinctive manner—especially for leitmotif works or figures. An end user, whether undergraduate, graduate student, or scholar, beginning a project on Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, for instance, will encounter a diverse panoply of resources. These include Anna Berman’s discussion of novelistic form in “The Novel I” that addresses the representation of psychological depth via narrative complexity in Lermontov’s novel, Vitaly Chernetsky’s analysis of “Empire,” which presents the equivocal stakes of the myth of the Caucasus and its conquest by the Russian Empire for Lermontov and other romantics, and Evgenii Bernstein’s chapter on “Queerness,” which could ground an investigation of the homoeroticism of Lermontov’s novel in relation to Oriental stereotypes relating to sexuality. Most pertinently, the volume includes not one but two complete analyses of A Hero of Our Time in William Mills Todd III’s two-page close reading of it (one of the “Boxes”) and in a section of Michael Kunichika’s chapter on “The Non-Russian.”

In this, The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature works something like a classic Russian thick journal of the nineteenth century, in Todd’s explanation of it in his chapter dedicated to that institution. It is a compendium of cutting-edge thought, in which multivocality generates an open framework for interpretation, analysis, and hermeneutic participation on the part of readers. One might refer here to Todd’s examination of the position of the reception of Fedor Dostoevskii’s The Idiot, as serialized in The Russian Herald: “Readers are compelled to speculate, infer, and—increasingly—explain and piece together the novel for themselves” (283). To borrow and slightly rephrase Todd’s words, readers of The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature encounter openness to multiple discourses, contact with unfolding events, and the unfinalizability of the present moment (283). Rather than a culminating statement of scholarly authority, this volume invites its readers to join an ongoing conversation. It is a generative and exciting work, a valuable new resource for educational use and for general readers, and a great achievement of synthetic scholarship.

Planning for the New Cambridge History of Russia began in 2017. Yet its execution reflects the transformative events that have transpired since that time. Paradoxically, given the general condition of quarantined isolation and immobility of 2020–22, the era of ubiquitous and enhanced web-conferencing that came into being as a result of the global pandemic made it possible for the volume’s authors and editors to gather virtually multiple times in order to workshop contributions, to refine the integration of multiple scholarly perspectives, and to balance matters of inclusion and coverage. Furthermore, although the open-ended organization of the volume long predates the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is a highly apt approach for such a work in an era of crisis, when answers to questions such as “Who counts as a Russian author?” and “Where does Russia end and émigré or Russophone literature begin?” have been laid bare as historically contingent matters dependent on power, ideology, and imperial violence.

One final comparison with its predecessor reveals the degree to which the years of its creation shaped the volume under review. The institutional homes of the twelve authors of the 1989 Cambridge History of Russian Literature (all men, one may note, except for Evelyn Bristol) were located in western Europe, the US, and Israel. At the inception of work on the New Cambridge History of Russian Literature, the authorial collective included scholars from the US, Europe, and Russia. However, as a result of emigration following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, none now remain in Russia. This is to say, while in original conception the volume aspired to represent the transnational scholarly community that over three decades had come to bridge the past divides of the Cold War, in final form it reflects the renewed gulfs between Russia and the west. Both in its ontological destabilization of “Russian Literature” and its “History,” and in the particulars of its choices and accounts, this volume would be unimaginable (possibly illegal) in the context of present-day Russian academic life and publishing. The discipline it represents is that of Russian literary studies outside of Russia.