Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities

Igal Halfin, ed. Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities. Cummings Center Series. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002. x, 403 pp. Index. $54.50, cloth. $26.50, paper.Edited collections are often criticized for being uneven or for lacking focus, but seems to me that judging collections such as Language and Revolution by the standards of the traditional monograph is a mistake. The point of collecting a number of essays from different scholars is not to produce a unified argument but to approach a common theme from a number of different angles and source bases. Successful editors solicit papers from smart people and then create a that is greater than the sum of its parts, either by having the authors engage with one another in fruitful ways or by arranging and introducing the pieces in a similarly productive fashion.Igal Halfin succeeded in the first and most important editorial task; he gathered a group of smart and interesting scholars together for a conference in Tel Aviv in 1999. The aim of the conference was to gather proponents of the turn to take a stance against the old historiography, which tended to focus on social and political history, while simultaneously enabling the beginning of a between different disciplines and branches of modern history on the subject of and identity (p. 2). Historians of twentieth-century Russia will be familiar with most of the authors and the topics they have been working on, since some of this work has recently emerged as part of larger projects. Thus we have Boris Kolonitskii focusing on rumours and Russian political culture during World War I, Peter Holquist on the construction of the Cossacks in 1918, Mark Steinberg on proletarian writers, Jochen Hellbeck on Stalin-era narratives, Katerina Clark on Stalinist film (specifically Volga-Volga), Boris Gasparov on Shostakovich, David Hoffmann on physical culture and Soviet bodies, Eric Naiman on bodies and terror, and Halfin himself on intimacy in an ideological key. In addition, Halfin invited a number of other Europeanists to attend the conference and contribute to the volume. David Andress, Peter Fritzsche, David Horn, Boaz Neumann, Avner Ben-Amos, Elisabeth Domansky, and Dan Diner offer essays ranging on topics from citizenship in the French Revolution to the Holocaust in historical memory.Halfin was considerably less successful in the second task of a collection editor, though. Far from being greater than the sum of the parts, the whole of this collection was mysteriously less than that of the individual submissions, either because the tone of the conference from which these papers emerged or the direction set by the editor was too extremein its approach to language. all talk of enabling a brisk dialogue on the importance of aside, Halfin docs seem to believe that the focus of (all?) historical study should be on and alone, even upbraiding two of his contributors (Mark Steinberg and Elisabeth Domansky) for trivializing language by eventually seek[ing] reality outside of it (p. 26). The criticism is telling. In the first place, shows that the stance of the authors represented here is not quite so united as Halfin originally claimed. Secondly, given that few historians would see any trivialization in Steinberg's careful unpacking of the of Soviet worker-writers or Domansky's investigation of postwar collective memory in Germany, shows that Halfin and several of the other contributors have moved from linguistic avant-gardism to radical linguistic absolutism.Even the more sober scholars in the collection appear to have been affected by the tone of the volume. Take, for example, Katerina Clark's sharp essay on the film Volga-Volga. …

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