Sobranie sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 7, book 1: Zhurnal puteshestviia: Dnevnik 1901-1903. Istoriia moei dushi [Record of a Journey: Diary, 1901-3. The Story of My Soul], and: O Makse, o Koktebele, o sebe: Vospominaniia. Pis´ma [On Max, Koktebel´, and Myself: Memoirs. Letters], and: Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (review)

"About 300 years ago, the courts of European monarchs boasted artificial dwarves. A child would be placed inside a foreshortened porcelain barrel with a hole in its bottom and kept there for several years. Then the barrel would be broken and an unnaturally fat, squat little freak on thin legs would crawl out of the porcelain debris. If such a dwarf were given Zeus's head with its curly hair and luxurious beard, you would get Max Voloshin."¹ This sarcastic comment comes from Boris Sadovskoi's recollection of his immediate impressions of the poet in the late 1800s. At the time, Sadovskoi (an intimate friend of Vladislav Khodasevich and a talented man of letters in his own right) was unaware that he himself was soon to become a cripple, spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair in sheer agony. Nor did he know that Voloshin would merit scholarly biographies (including the one under review), books of memoirs, an exquisite non-feature film Golosa (Voices, 1997) by Andrei Osipov, annual literary competitions in his honor, and a voluminous edition of his collected works, thus eclipsing many of his illustrious peers in popularity and attention in 21st-century Russia.² It would not be an exaggeration to say that in the 2000s, Maximilian Voloshin (1877–1932) is as popular with the students of culture and readers at large as were Vladimir Nabokov and Mikhail Kuzmin in the 1990s, Akhmatova in the 1980s, and Mikhail Bulgakov in the 1960s.

"If [Voloshin] is little known outside Russia, even among intellectuals and scholars familiar with the region, that is because we outsiders do not really understand his world," the cultural historian Barbara Walker explains in her illuminating and well-researched book (2). An original poet, perceptive art critic, and imaginative painter of Crimean landscapes, until recently Voloshin was remembered primarily as Marina Tsvetaeva's guardian angel whom she celebrated in "Zhivoe o zhivom" (A Living Thing about a Living Person), a fervent commemorative essay written shortly after Voloshin's death in 1932. In his lifetime, Voloshin "was more famous than well known." "I cannot think of a more tempting subject for a biographical novel," the art critic Erikh Gollerbakh claimed in 1934.³ Walker's timely book is neither a biographical novel, however, nor a literary biography in the conventional understanding of this genre. "Rather, it addresses a set of interlinked questions pertaining to the culture and society of the literary intelligentsia" "at a vital moment in its development," that is, "during the years of transition from the Imperial polity to the Soviet one" (3, 2).

Although Tsvetaeva's recollections undoubtedly provided inspiration and an impetus for Walker's research, her treatment of the subject is radically different from that of Tsvetaeva. While the latter lays claim to a unique bond with Voloshin, founded on their affinity and Voloshin's unbounded generosity ("I can say that he loved poems exactly as I did, that is, as if he himself were incapable of writing any poetry, with the whole strength of an unrequited love for a power beyond reach"),⁴ Walker, in a sense, strips this lasting relationship of...