The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia by Spencer Golub (review)

Book Reviews 375 politics appears at best superficial. Describing post·war Irish drama as "post-colonial" on the basis (a) that Ireland left the British commonwealth in 1948 (thus rendering invalid Britiish theatre-licensing laws in Ireland) and (b) that recent Irish plays show features of anti-hierarchical characterisation and the lack of a central plot is to grossly over-simplify complex historical relationships between the prestige of theatre as an institution in Ireland and the prestige associated with British colonial power. A similar procrustean strain is evident whenever the book alludes to politics. Thus there is the contention that the central position of strong female characters in plays such as Murphy 's Bailegangaire or Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa implies a species of feminism (Friel, we are told, "puts the Irish stage in touch with the otherness of woman"!) and there is the book's extraordinary silence concerning the relati~nship between the thealIe and the state in Northern Ireland under Stormont. Restricted to a critically appreciative approach to the institutional and literary theatre in Ireland, it is unsurprising that Roche does not consider other less onhodox forms of theatre associated with Irish political protest and resistance. Despite many achievements, it is a pity that this bookwith its valorisation of the international dimensions of Irish drama - ultimately chooses the path of so many of its predecessors in insulating the Irish theatre from a more inclusive and searching consideration of the relationship between theatre and politics. LIONEL PILKINGTON, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE GALWA Y SPENCER GOLUB. The Recurrence of Fate: Theatre and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press [994· pp. xiii, 277, illustrated. $27.95; $[4.95 (PB) With his new book, Spencer Golub has accomplished what few in academic writing ever do. While many scholarly monographs risk little, and therefore say little, this scholarly treatise doubles as a work of art, a masterpiece of elegant acuity. To read Golub's densely constructed and evocative prose slyJe is to watch a verbal acrobat deftly balancing multiple meanings on a single image. Golub's subject is the twentieth-century Russian intelligentsia, the artist-intellectuals who model themselves in the image of an ever-changing set of icons and cultural symbols, both Russian (Khlestakov•. Chatsky, Zhivago) and non-Russian (Salome, Hamlet, Chaplin). The end result is a far-reaching exegesis of Russian intellectuals in their various incarnations as Chatsky-Pierrot-Christ-Hamlet-Woman, martyred and marginalized by the events of their century. The book looks beyond a limited definition of theatre to a large field of performative activities (show trials, funerals, political acts), but its heart is an examination of the work of theatre's modernist dyad: playwrights and directors. These artists, working to engender what Golub calls "astonishment , the modernist imperative," were themselves astonished by history, caught on board a train moving rapidly in a direction to of their choosing. Several of the essays in the book have been published previously; although Golub's Book Reviews introduction works to harness them all together as manifestations of cultural mise en scene, ultimately each chapter maps its own fascinating terrain. The book as a whole does not so much advance a single thesis as offer a montage of ways of seeing, ways that expand rather than reduce our thinking. Golub's analysis of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard exemplifies his overall strategy of juxtaposing stage events with the larger metatheatricallevel of Russian/Soviet life. He reads the playas a critique of the intelligentsia's malaise by contrasting differing notions of time: the characters' relative or subjective notions of time (as theorized by Einstein. Bergson, Uspcnsky) versus the compelling image of the railroad timetable and Lenin's arrival, by train, at Petrograd in 1917. The play becomes an image for all of Russia on the brink of revolution, about to reach a utopia on the rapid schedule of the four-year Five-Year Plan. Other chapters reveal various other models for the creative intelligentsia's selfcreation . In chapters t~o and three, Golub reads the images of women artists (Ida Rubinstein and Vera Kommissarzhevskaya) and characters (Goncharova in Olesha's List ofBlessings) as images for male...