Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire by Derek C. Maus Review by: Denise J.

Youngblood Slavic Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (FALL 2012), pp. 716-717 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.71.3.0716 . Accessed: 21/01/2014 10:09
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and propaganda play an important role too, and in writing about war ction, keeping the biographies, writing and publication histories, trends and reactions straight can be a herculean task. Ellis is up to the job. Importantly, the book begins by laying out a variety of responses to war: in Elliss formulation, pacism, Remarquism, heroic pragmatism, the just war, and Jngerism (1) are the categories into which war ctionand straightforward human as well as philosophical responses to war can be placed. As the author explains it, Remarquism, for example, was the kind of pacism that admitted the need for duty to ones country; under the Soviet regime it was a dirty word ung at authors who paid too much attention to the details of war. Most important, as he notes, war literature is . . . preeminently the literature of remembrance (3); and the Soviets had plenty to remember. The rst chapter of the book provides an overview of the relationship between art and war throughout history and a context for Soviet war ction from 1941 through glasnost and beyond. Divided into seven chapters and an afterword, The Damned and the Dead takes its title from Viktor Astaf evs 1992 94 novel of that name. The author conveniently supplies an abstract for each chapter at its beginning. The writing is clear and well informed, with summaries of both plots and the travails of publication for each author and text he addresses. The chapters focus on a particular period of literary activity or a particular author or event; for example, chapter 2 looks at specic veterans who wrote in the aftermath of the war (Emmanuil Kazakevich, Grigorii Baklanov, and Iurii Bondarev). Chapter 3 follows the career of Belorussian writer Vasil Bykov, and chapter 5 considers a number of treatments of the Battle of Stalingrad, while chapter 7 looks at post-Soviet novels of the 1990s. The one outlying chapter is number 6, based on NKVD reports from Stalingrad, which is purely historical. In every chapter, the authors expertise as a literary scholar is couched in historical and philosophical investigations of the statistical and moral consequences of war, thus in many cases treating war ction as a source for information (or an example of misinformation) about battles, policies, and relationships between soldiers, ofcers, commissars, and political organizations. This book will be interesting to students of war and war literature generally, to specialists in Russian history and literature, and to the general public. The Damned and the Dead does not skirt complicated authors or ethical situations; as readers may know, Astaf ev was accused of ultranationalist and even antisemitic views, and two other authors whom Ellis analyzes, Ivan Stadniuk and Vladimir Bogomolov, represent a nuevo-Stalinist look at events during World War II. Yet in addition to bringing important Soviet war authors to the attention of a non-Russian reading audience and lling in the blanks for those who are not acquainted with the full panorama of Soviet war ction, The Damned and the Dead makes two essential assertions that will stay with the reader. First, World War II was an extremely personal war, experienced in one way or another by virtually all authors of the second half of the twentieth century, and those experiences also shaped the worldviews of Russian and Soviet citizens and readers. Second, Ellis asserts that most Soviet war literature deals with two wars (15). The second war is the struggle between authors and the Communist Party and its apparatus (including publishing concerns, the Writers Union, and censorship agencies) that continued nonstop from 1941 through 1991. The rst war, about which we can read in ction and historical documents, always includes that second war within it. Angela Brintlinger Ohio State University

Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire. By Derek C. Maus. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011. xvi, 247 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Chronology. Index. $49.95, hard bound. The last few years have witnessed a cultural turn in Cold War studies, as more scholars have begun to investigate the role of soft power in that conict. One of the most effective means for subverting Cold War propaganda was through satirical literature. In this book Derek C. Maus seeks to reveal the existence and scope of such nonaligned critiques and

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then to evaluate their philosophical merits (ix). He does this by comparing migr Russian subversive satire with its American counterpart. Unvarnished Reality is divided into ve chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. Chapter 1, The Role of Literature during the Cold War, is a critical survey of the cultural context of the Cold War, plus a historical overview of subversive satire that never quite succeeds in providing a working denition (14). Mauss main point is that subversive satire is not a dejected response but a strident afrmation of a need for a new worldview in the face of extreme circumstances resulting from pervasive ideological entrenchment (19). Chapter 2, which probes The Intersection of Literature and Politics during the Cold War, is primarily a literature review that looks at the works of other scholars and criticslike Tony Tanner, Paul Maltby, Wolfgang Iser, and otherswho have written on Cold War literature. In chapters 3 5, Maus gets to the heart of his subject, the literature itself, and it is here that he makes his most original contributions, analyzing the works of the usual suspects Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, Vasilii Aksenov and Vladimir Voinovichalong with those by authors who are less well known, at least to the uninitiated, like Robert Coover and Russell Hoban, Daniil Granin and Mark Kharitonov. Not surprisingly, some thematic and structural congruities emerge. Maus has read voluminously in his subject, both in the literature and in critical studies (over 100 novels are included in the bibliography). He is to be applauded for his fresh readings of dystopian classics as well as for bringing lesser-known writers into the story. The book suffers, however, from a number of problems. At times Unvarnishing Reality seems to be as much about the accumulated criticism of the works as about the works themselves. The tendentiousness of this approach weighs the book down, stripping some very lively novels of their liveliness. The historical context is both supercial and one-dimensional, mainly focused on providing a brief political overview, rather than a nuanced understanding of the culture and society that produced these books. The fact that the vast majority of the Russian works were produced in emigration and distributed for the most part in foreign languages should complicate the analysis but does not. (It is mentioned and then immediately discarded at the beginning of the book.) Why does Maus label the satire as Russian and not Soviet? The writers, once Soviet citizens, were, after all, satirizing the Soviet system. (To be fair, Maus does attempt to connect the Cold War satire with the Russian tradition of subversive satire, but this reviewer did not nd it successful.) Who was the intended audience? The international community or the underground readership at home? (The question of readership and distribution/sales likewise never troubles the discussion of the American novels.) In addition, the book is not truly comparative. The author sets his case studies side by side but rarely draws any connections or comparisons between them himself, leaving the mental heavy-lifting for the reader. Finally, the book would have beneted from a conclusion that wove its many threads into a cohesive whole. These caveats notwithstanding, Maus does succeed in his original goal for Unvarnishing Reality: to reveal the existence and scope of such non-aligned critiques (ix). If a reader is looking for a quick survey of Russian and American Cold War ction, this is it. The book may also stimulate further consideration of how the Soviet migr satirists contributed to the dynamics of Soviet literature. Unvarnishing Reality will be most useful for specialists on American and Soviet Cold War cultures and literatures. Denise J. Youngblood University of Vermont

Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Tricksters Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture. By Mark Lipovetsky. Cultural Revolutions: Russia in the Twentieth Century. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. 296 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $65.00, hard bound. Mark Lipovetsky has produced a welcome addition to the growing area of scholarship examining performative discourses in Soviet and post-Soviet culture. Using an original approach, Lipovetsky examines the trickster as the key player in these discourses. He relies

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