Slavic Drama. The Question of Innovation ed. by Andrew Donskov et al. (review)

534 Book Reviews Taken singly, these complaints might point to mere peccadilloes, but in aggregrate, they make the book feel a bit "slapdash," to borrow George's favorite pejorative, as if some pressing factor (a ticking tenure clock? a language barrier? a crippling dependence on secondary sources?) prevented what still seem like necessary revisions. The editors (and the proofreaders) at University of Texas Press must share some of the responsibility for these weaknesses, which detract from an impressive body of research, much of it drawn from direct observations and interviews with leading figures in Brazilian theater. David George's The Modern Brazilian Stage won't become known as a landmark of theater scholarship, but it provides an informative introduction (in English) to the subject, even as it paves the way for more penetrating analyses. SCUIT T. CUMMINGS ANDREW DONSKOV, RICHARD SOKOLOWSKI with ROMAN WERETELNYK and JOHN WOODSWORTH , eds. Slavic Drama. The Question ofInnovation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa I99I. pp. 359. $30.00 This collection of more than thirty papers for an international symposium at the University of Ottawa in May I99I promises more than it delivers. Despite the title, not all the main branches of Slavic drama are given adequate coverage. Such an imbalance would be less objectionable if significant plays and dramatists from the countries emphasized - Poland, Ukraine, and Russia - were consistently highlighted. But how galling it must be to those interested in Czech, Slovak, Serbian, and Croatian drama to . see them largely slighted here in favour of studies of literary works which are not plays,of writers whose dramatic pieces are the least important or, at best, the least known of their output, or of theatrical topics and personalities meriting less attention. Moreover, too few of the contributions are devoted to the question of innovation that the symposium was supposed to address. Only a handful of essays isolate some of the major facets of the issue: some offer a theoretical perspective on innovation, others suggest the ways in which some playwrights contributed to or influenced change in their own or in non-Slavic countries, and at least one noted poet and playwright affirms that the search for the new drives and torments all creators. But many of the participants either ignore the basic issue, except for some perfunctory mention in an introduction or conclusion, or else seem to believe that innovation is synonymous with modernism or postmodernism and proceed to list all the requisite features of twentiethcentury art exhibited by the plays and playwrights they treat. Yet the volume does contain some fine essays. Irene Makaryk studies Shevchenko's Russian plays for the light they may cast on the poetry he wrote in Ukrainian, and suggests that his appreciation of Shakespeare, .based on French and Russian translations that drastically revised and adapted the original plays, accounts for the melodramatic features that pervade his writings but are more successfully employed in the poetry. Bohdan Budurowycz's informative essay shows how and why the historical situation of the fragmentation and disintegration of twelfth-century Kievan Rus' was recreated in a play by the nineteenth-century Western Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. Also valu- Book Reviews 535 able is Les' Taniuk's examination of the development in modern Ukrainian drama of the Romantic image of the prophet and of the complex relationship between prophet and audience. . Three essays on Polish drama are of special interest. Daniel Gerould does a masterful job in describing precisely and concisely the dramatic works and achievements of Slawomir Mrozek. Offering a penetrating look at the five giants of modem Polish drama, Bogdan Czaykowski notes the similarities and dissimilarities in their critical response to poetry and to poetic drama, both of which are central to the Polish literary tradition. Stanislaw Baranczak analyzes the charming but devastating miniature plays or small narratives in dialogue form by Miron Bialoszewski that comment on the uses and abuses of language, people, and history, though the failure to mention the precedent of Galczynski is puzzling. Among the contributions devoted to Russian drama two stand out. Emma Polockaja compares the creative "loner" in Hauptmann's Einsame Menschen with his counterpart , Treplev, in Chekhov's The Seagull; the differences in the characters and their characterization...