A Karenina Companion by C.J.G. Turner (review)

234 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 influence was muffled because it carne to be known mainly through a bowdlerized edition. Garneau's poetry does indeed make an astonishing leap from the stilted neo-classicism of Michel Bibaud. Small samplings of it have long been known because they have been included in editions of his Histoire after 1845. To know how literature was developing we should know more of it; on the other hand, as Lemire shows in a later chapter, its early impact was not what we might expect. Lorimier's letters on the eve of execution, though without the effusions of the High Romantic poets, show the serious self-searching and noble dedication to. a public ideal which characterize a main stream in Romanticism. They also show a fine command of epistolary style, even though they were not intended for publication, and they are a valid landmark in the progress of subjective writing. These authors bear witness to the progress of writing, but had little irnmed~ate impact. So they occupy only a small part of a volume taken up by conditions of production, major influences, and essential institutions such as the press. Many other writers, of whom few are generally known to literary historians, are described in terms of genre, theme, and style. So we learn of a flourishing theatre life, even if very few original plays survive. Travel writing is an important touchstone; with real continuity from earlier writers like La Verendrye, it took on new forms, showing, by 1836, a distinct Romantic sensibility under the pen of J.-B.-A. Ferland (not published, however, until 1861). Well-known figures like Papineau appear as a bridge into personal writing from the prose developed in the public discourse of the earlier period. Lemire brings a mass of such rnaterial to show that 'la poetisation d'un pays' is not a spontaneous happening. In Lower Canada, the writing-reading institution developed late enough for its genesis to be traced by modem methods of documentation. The Centre de recherche en litterature quehecoise convincingly shows the value of such methods, creating a new perspective for the writers mentioned in this review, but also for the movement of which they were precursors, appearing in volume 3. (JACK WARWICK) CJ.G. Turner. A Karelli,m Companion Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 220. $38.50 paper This is the kind of book that is useful because of its modesty. The author has no axe to grind. He does not state a thesis and then try to prove it. Instead he gathers together information that a non-Russian-speaking reader of Anna Karenina might find helpful to extend his or her understanding of the text. This is Professor Turner's objective - 'to make the novel more readily accessible to English speakers who encounter it and HUMANITIES 235 find themselves seriously engaged by it' - and within the limits he has set himself he has fulfilled it admirably. The book contains seven chapters and two bibliographies of criticism available in English. Chapter 1 traces Tolstoy's life between the completion of War and Peace and the completion of Anna Karenina. Chapter 2 discusses the numerous drafts of the novel and reviews the attempts to make sense of them. This chapter, despite its necessary brevity, will intrigue readers who otherwise would have no access to the drafts. Chapter 3 collects Tolstoy's own comments about his novel. The student who wants more can read Tolstoy's letters from this period that have been translated and published by RF. Christian. Chapter 4, 'A Recent Edition of Anna Karenina and Its New Readings,' explains and illustrates a dilemma of textology. Anna Karenina was first published serially in 1875-7, and Tolstoy and his friend Nikolai Strakhov revised it for publication in book form in 1878. The Soviet Jubilee Edition (1928-58) based its text of the novel on this revision. A subsequent 1970 Soviet edition of the novel follows the Jubilee by regarding the 1878 text as authoritative, but tries to distinguish between Tolstoy's and Strakhov's changes and to preserve the former while discarding the latter. This task was made more difficult by the fact that Tolstoy approved some of...