The Voice of the Burdash: Charles Mair and the Divided Mind in Canadian Literature by Norman Shrive (review)

254 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 in the finished work.' In order to do this, she returns to the position of Eikhenbaurn and Shklovsky that War and Peace is aristocratic in conception (Tolstoy found himself more able to give an inner life to a thoroughbred horse than to a human peasant) and partly updates their arguments in the light of the draft materials that had not been published when they were writing. But she adds a strong argument that identifies the fragmentary 'Distant Field' with the 'Decembrist tale' that Tolstoy claims to have been writing in 1856i this not only suggests another ideological predecessor to the beginnings of War and Peace but also links its ideas to the time when reform was on the public agenda, when Tolstoy had, for once, been mingling with liberal writers and intellectuals in St Petersburg, and when he travelled to France for the first time. And she offers a judicious assessment of the way in which his thinking was stimulated and his ideas reinforced by his reading, making a particularly strong case for Faber and Tocqueville. Someofthe cormectionssuggestedseem ratherremote,but the general thesis is well taken that War and Peace -began with an essentially political conception, even if it became more psychological, moral, and ultimately philosophical as a result of Tolstoy'S revisions in late 1864. Misprints are minor and for the most part confined to transliterated Russian1but a gratuitous soft sign is added to Sonia throughout and occasionally to other names. In the last chapter there are a few signs of pressure to complete the work: its first sentence appears to contradict note 22 to the precedingchapter; and a few pages later we encounter the obvious inaccuracy that by 1863-64 the emancipation 'had been in effect for several years.' The editors suggest that the missing year (1811) in the narrative will be news to most of us, but it was not news1for example, to Wedel. On the other hand, they are quite correct in appreciating Feuer's rare combination of 'exhaustive archival sleuthing with keen literary sensibility': would that it were not so rare! (c.J.G. TURNER) Norman Shrive. The Voice ofthe Burdash: Charles Mair and the Divided Mind in Canadian Literature .Canadian Poetry Press 1995. xii, 190. $17.00 'Burdash/ explained Mair, is the name given by hunters to the hermaphroditic animal with a 'glossy and rich brown fur,' occaSionally found in a large herd, that yielded 'ten times the price of the ordinary robe of commerce.' In Mair's 1888 poem 'The Last Bison,' the versifying animal (in language tha~ Desmond Pacey described as 'appropriate to an itinerant evangelist') praises the Indian, mourns the slaughter of the buffalo, and foresees the decline of the white man. Although Shrive draws on the Burdash as one metaphor for Mair's divided vision, his detailed account of HUMANlTIES 255 Mair's richly troubled life provides ample evidence of more entangled conflicts than the voice of the Burdash might contain. The book is better -than the title: despite the reasonable attempt in the four-page conclusion to summarize Marrs progress, rise, and decline in neatly antithetical, J divided' terms, Shrive's astute tracing of the contradictions that make up Mair's personal, professional, nationalist, and literary vocations reveal a more interesting and perhaps less representative·Canadian. Two major strands inform Shrive's account: the first, essentially biographical, shows how Marr's personality and temperament sharply inflected the development ofhis nationalist inclinations. Shrive documents Mair's eager embrace of Canada First asa young man; his journey west to Red River (where he got himself into considerable trouble with his condescending letters back east to the Globe, resulting in a memorable whipping at the hands of Mrs Bannatyne, an offended Red River lady, at the post office); and his move to Prince Albert, where he became a leading citizen and passionate advocate of westward expansion. This story of the private and public faces of a romantic nationalist is intertwined with Shrive's account of Mair's literary career, and it is at this intersection that a major (and persuasive) element in Shrive's thesis emerges: that an ardent belief in Canada and its destiny does not...