Spook or Spoof?: The Structure of the Supernatural in Russian Romantic Tales by Delbert D. Phillips (review)

Book Reviews281 Script into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (University of Texas Press, 1977); and the special issue of Poetics Today, Vol. II, No. 3 (1981). Languages ofthe Stage is a collection of eleven of Pavis's essaysdealing with the general issues of a semiological approach to the complex phenomena of the theatrical event, as well as with specific topics like mime, staging, and the nature of dramatic criticism. The major virtue of a theatrical semiology is a theoretical framework that postulates the integrative functioning of the various dramatic components, viewed either as potentialities in the script or performance book, or as concrete realizations in a particular production. Pavis's contribution is to maintain an essentially practical criticism in his discussions. He maintains the priority of the theatrical spectacle over the dramatic text, while not denigrating the importance of the latter. He sees the contribution of semiology less as a hermeneutics or as a closedanalytical tool than as an internally coherent strategy for dealing with a complex cultural phenomenon. Less a question of "applying" a semiological analysis to the theater, Pavis sees it as an intellectually reasonable way — not incompatible with other forms of commentary on the theater — of undertaking significant criticism. It would be unfortunate if Pavis's work and other treatises on theatrical semiology remained familiar to only students of the theater. There is much of value here for the analysis of drama by researchers with basically a literary emphasis. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University Delbert D. Phillips. Spook or Spoof?: The Structure of the Supernatural in Russian Romantic Tales. Washington, D. C: University Press of America, 1982. 164p. Tales of the supernatural became popular in Russia in the 1820's and 30's. Literarty salons were filled as Bestuzhev-Marlinskij, Somov, Odoevskij, Pogorel'skij, and Vel'tman read their amazing stories of alleged transnormal occurrences. Better-known literary figures like Pushkin and Gogol also indulged in the genre. The stories themselves, published largely in literary journals and almanacs, form the subject of Phillips's detailed elucidation. The approach to the criticism here is eclectic . . . part historical, tracing the genre's roots back through the well-known English and German antecedents to Greek and Roman antiquity; part psychological, delving into questions of epistemology and of man's apprehension of death; part symbolic, clarifying the hidden significance of names and numbers; and part structural, focusing primary attention on the devices by which the authors fix into the reader's mind an ambiguity between natural and supernatural explanations for the strange events depicted. Phillips's presentation of these structural aspects is the most impressive part of the study. As he entertainingly relates the plot of each story studied, he demonstrates how the supernatural occurrrences related in each are foreshadowed by frenetic or unstable psychological states in the involved characters, how the transition from natural to supernatural is characteristically masked from the reader, and even how the presence of the supernatural evolves through a sensory progression ofsight, hearing, and finally touch. As one reads Phillips's explanation of the masking devices, dreams within dreams only retrospectively revealed, for example, or the ambiguous incorporation of one level of narrative reality into 282ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW another, one becomes aware that the genre to this date has not evolved much past 1840. Such was the sophistication of these authors in the practiceofastonishing their readers and leaving them to wonder . . . was it Spook or Spoof! Phillips has done a fine job in this study. There are previously untreated works brought to our attention. There are new insights on more-studied works given to us in abundance. There is a valid synthesis of diverse aspects of structural similarity in the stories treated which goes a long way toward an ultimate definition of the genre itself. And we are even entertained. I would quibble only over the transliteration convention used, preferring the international scholarly over the popular system no doubt enforced on Phillips by the word-processor font, and with thefact that several Russian titles are not accessible from the notes given for translated versions in the text. These quibbles, however, should not detract from a fresh and valuable work. LEE B. CROFT Arizona...