Russian Modernism in the Memories of the Survivors: The Duvakin Interviews, 1967–1974 By Slav N.Gratchev, MargaritaMarinova, IrinaEvdokimova. Translated by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021, xii + 234 pp. $80.00. ISBN 978‐1‐4874‐2725‐9

The story of Victor Duvakin (1909–82), a professor of Russian literature sacked from Moscow State University (MGU) for testifying in defense of his pupil Andrei Siniavskii, is well known. Following his dismissal, the long-time student of Russian modernist poetry was encouraged by the MGU’s commiserating rector to embark on a university-sponsored oral history project. Duvakin went on to interview dozens of individuals, explaining his purpose as follows: “my main goal is to create a collection of original phono-documents that capture the history of Russian culture of the first three decades of the twentieth century” (p. 9). The scholar deposited his tape-recorded interviews at the MGU Library, which has recently made them publicly accessible (http://oralhistory.ru). Since the end of the Soviet Union, several volumes of transcribed interviews have been published in Russia. They range from conversations with Mikhail Bakhtin to volumes addressing the life and times of Russian modernist culture: dialogues with theater actress, director, and pedagogue Aleksandra Azarkh-Granovskaia; writer and literary theorist Viktor Shklovskii; painter Evgeniia Lang; and satirist and cartoonist Viktor Ardov. Some of Duvakin’s interviews have recently come out in English translation, making the book under review the third installment in a series. The present volume contains two interviews with Viktor Ardov, a conversation with Roman Jakobson, and two dialogues with Vladimir and Ariadna Sosinsky. Ardov shares his memories of Sergei Esenin and the Moscow literary scene of the early 1920s, mostly trivial anecdotes that may delight some connoisseurs of Russian modernism but will be lost on other readers; and relates his impressions of Vsevolod Meyerhold in a more substantial discussion that will appeal to theater historians outside Russian studies. Roman Jakobson narrates his interactions with Maiakovsky and his circle. The Sosinskys, having spent a large part of their adult lives abroad, give an account of their expatriation; describe their literary circle in Paris, with a special focus on Marina Tsvetaeva and Isaac Babel, and their acquaintance with Boris Pasternak after the couple’s repatriation. A thoughtful afterword by Caryl Emerson closes the volume with a reflection on oral history as a form of historiography rooted in highly unreliable sources (human memory)—a problem exacerbated by the understandable caution of Duvakin’s interlocutors. Emerson’s essay aside, the rest of the volume’s paratext leaves much to be desired. The interviews were conducted at the time when the memory of Russian modernist culture was still an ideological minefield in the Soviet Union. As former participants in that culture, some of Duvakin’s interlocutors had experienced official opprobrium, mastering survival strategies that did not predispose them to candid recollections. The documentary deluge of the post-Soviet years has changed the primary function of these conversations, originally intended to fill information gaps created by Soviet ideology in Russian cultural historiography. Today, the main interest of these dialogues is in the subjectivity of Duvakin’s interlocutors, in their personal takes on the people and events recalled. The process of oral storytelling now trumps the story itself: idiosyncratic opinions become as important as verifiable historical facts; what is omitted is at least as significant as what is recounted; factual gaffs, intentional or not, become meaningful. Consequently, the appreciation of Duvakin’s interviews requires a culturally competent audience but also explicatory tools pointing to what is missing or misrepresented in a narrative. That is why the Russian publications of the interviews have been annotated by teams of scholars with the requisite experience in preparing critical editions and specialized in the subjects brought up by Duvakin’s interlocutors. In contrast, the editors of the present volume are out of their depth in the art of preparing a critical edition and especially in the annotations. Readers will thus learn from these Kinbotean annotations that Maiakovsky and Esenin may have been assassinated by the Soviet secret police (pp. 7–8, n3–4); that Nikolai Ezhov, the head of the NKVD during the Great Purge of 1936–38, was the “attorney-general of the country” (p. 33, n94); and how Voronezh became the cradle of the Russian navy (apropos Ardov’s remark that his Russian is inflected with the Voronezh accent [p. 20, n45]). But they will not learn that the insult “pharmacist” employed by Esenin (p. 14) is a common antisemitic slur conveying Russian modernist resentment for the free cultural market, something Viktor Shklovskii confirms in his Poiski optimizma (1931). A passing mention of red Hussar trousers fashionable in the early 1920s Moscow rates a footnote on the history of the Hussar light cavalry in fifteenth-century Hungary, topped with an etymological excursion into the origins of the word “Hussar” (p. 15, n27). But no bibliographic references are cited for the articles in the Soviet press discussed by Ardov (pp. 47–48); and the annotators cannot get the most basic facts straight. Ariadna Chernov could not have “left [Russia] in the 1920s with her husband” (p. 71), since the future Mrs. Sosinsky was 13 at the time of her family’s emigration in 1921; émigré poet Antonin Ladinsky could not have received his Soviet citizenship in 1940 (p. 93, n56), because the Soviet law extending citizenship to émigrés was passed in June 1946, Ladinsky being among the first Russian Parisians to take up the offer. The list goes on. Despite the book’s enthusiastic back-cover endorsements, this reviewer is at a loss regarding its target audience and purpose. This was not an issue for the English translation of Duvakin’s conversations with Bakhtin, whose international stature guaranteed interest among Anglophone readers. But the interviews chosen for the present volume, whose dramatis personae and thematic scope fall squarely within the purview of Russianists, require from Anglophone readers sufficient cultural competence to see the significance of the characters, places, or events mentioned, and to infer what the interlocutors circumspectly leave out. Such readers are capable of familiarizing themselves with Duvakin’s interviews in Russian and will have no use for the annotations accompanying the translated interviews. Those, however, who do not have enough Russian are unlikely to have the requisite background knowledge for appreciating the details about actors of Russian modernism supplied by Duvakin’s interlocutors. Nor will such readers find much help in the accompanying scholarly apparatus.

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