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SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 874 empress, who on her marriage had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, had no difficulty in espousing two antithetic world-views, an indication that her commitment to neither of them went deep. Sumarokov, on the other hand, professed a sincere Christian belief incompatible with Voltairean atheism. While Catherine hypocritically subscribed to both world-views, Sumarokov in his honesty held his peace, reconfiguring himself as a Christian philosophe (p. 118). The consequence of Sumarokov’s discretion is that the discussion of this major development in his writing career has to be based on an argument ex silentio (pp. 89–90). This book is remarkable for the quality of its notes, which form almost a quarter of the work (pp. 163–225). With the page numbers to which the notes refer printed along the tops of the pages the notes are commendably easy to access. Researchers will be grateful for the full twenty-one-page select bibliography. There are some minor errors: the name of the Latin writer of fables is Phaedrus and not Phaedra (p. 7); ‘harkened back’ should be ‘harked back’ (p. 9); the title of P. Tallement’s novel is not ‘Voyage à l’isle d’amour’ but ‘Voyage de l’isle d’amour’ (p. 14); the translation of ‘Sposob k slozheniiu rossiiskikh stikhov’ should be ‘Aid to the Composition of Russian Verses’ and not ‘Aid to the Creation of Russian Poetry’ (p. 14); Russian filosof is not a calque of French philosophe but a direct borrowing from the Greek filosofos (pp. 82, 86); ‘khramonogomu’ should be ‘khromonogomu’ (p. 200, note 54). Dr Ewington’s frequent references to the works of such pioneers in the study of eighteenth-century Russian literature as David Lang, Grigorii Gukovskii and Pavel Berkov and to their successors in our time such as Joachim Klein, the late Viktor Zhivov and numerous writers of PhD theses situate her text in the mainstream of studies of eighteenth-century Russian literature, to which her own book makes a substantial and valuable contribution. The last publication of Sumarokov’s collected works in ten volumes was as long ago as 1787. Has not the time come for them to be reissued (p. 11)? Imperial College London C. L. Drage Drace-Francis, Alex. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture: Literacy and the Development of National Identity. Second revised edition. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2012. ix + 248 p. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index. £25.00 (paperback). The novelty of this brilliant investigation of Romanian cultural history comes from directing its analysis of the political dimension of cultural discourses not to the rather heavily travelled subject — in recent years — of twentieth-century intellectuals’ brushes with power in Romania, but to early nation-building processes. The period 1700–1890 enjoyed several valuable analyses in the past REVIEWS 875 century, but it was natural that the emergence of new theories of nationalism by Gellner, Anderson, Hroch and others would engender fresh inquiries into the formation of national identity in the Romanian case as well. Alex DraceFrancis does just that and, in the course of telling the Romanian story, he gathers some important insights into the particularities of the modernization processes in Eastern Europe that might help refine some aspects of the theory of nationalism itself. Drace-Francis analyses Romanian cultural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with an eye to the political dimension of the discourses around literacy and its prestigious vehicles: schools, universities, printing presses, newspapers, books and intellectuals. The concepts of writing and nation are deeply connected, as nations seek to be attested through ‘culture’ in the ‘eyes of Europe’. The result, as the author amply demonstrates, is a sophisticated use of culture and its vehicles for self-presentation, leading both to the constitution of a modern culture and to a very rich cultural complex that will fuel Romanian intellectual debates for more than a century. Using practically exhaustive information, a masterful historical expertise and a fine critical balance, Drace-Francis illustrates the importance of external influencestothecreationofamodernnationalidentityinSouth-EasternEurope, the unavoidably elitist character of culture for a people with a vast majority of illiterates and the complicated process through which differences between regions and generations...

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