Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science (Oxford University Press), by Daniel P. Todes
On page one of A Russian Life in Science we learn that Ivan Pavlov never trained a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. Heavy in scale at 731 pages and wide in cultural scope, Daniel P. Todes’ biography is marred only by occasional stylistic lapses (a new generation of iconoclasts might be necessary to expunge “iconic” from overuse) as it cuts through accretions of false information about Pavlov. Among Todes’ findings: The famed physiologist preferred chimpanzees to dogs and scientific inquiry to the pseudo-science of Marxism-Leninism. Uncloaking his work from the dogma imposed during Stalin’s era, Todes discovers a dissident protected in life by his international reputation. After his death in 1936, many of his associates were rounded up for execution or the gulag.
The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (University of Wisconsin Press), by Colleen McQuillen
The final decades of imperial Russia were a time of great cultural fertility. The Modernist Masquerade looks at one of the least-explored manifestations of Russia’s “Silver Age.” Masquerades and all their accouterments, including costumes and masks, became an opportunity for critiquing social, political and even gender relations. Female impersonators flourished, people “used their bodies as polemical billboards” and costumes gave rise to new possibilities for expression and social mobility. The Soviet regime was not impressed, and deliberately used the term “unmask” when exposing alleged enemies of the state.
Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children’s Literature 1920-1935, Beautiful Books, Terrible Times (Redstone Press/Princeton Architectural Press), edited by Julian Rothenstein and Olga Budashevskaya
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Some artists whose work is included here are well known, but their illustrations for children’s books less so. El Lissitzky and Vladimir Mayakovsky contributed to the picture books along with writers such as Osip Mandelstam. Creative typography and abstractions of the human figure and collages of photos mixed with kids’ drawings share space with more conventional illustrations. As in his famous work, Lissitzky played with geometry and loved black and red. Most everything conformed to the party line, but that didn’t save some of the artists from Stalin’s paranoia. As Philip Pullman writes in his forward, the innovation of Bolshevism’s heady first years may have continued a little longer in children’s literature, a genre the authorities scrutinized less carefully than novels, film and paintings.
Limonov (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Emmanuel Carrere
Eduard Limonov was a dissident Soviet poet who emigrated to New York in the ’70s and Paris in the ’80s. He was a punk rocker and provocateur, the toast of self-consciously alternative art scenes, and in the tradition of the artist as swashbuckler. Emmanuel Carrere’s hilariously insightful account follows Limonov from the degradation of his Stalinist childhood through his punk years, his adventures in Bosnia (fighting for the Serbs) and his formation upon return to Russia of the National Bolsheviks, whose combination of fascism and Communism makes sense if one recognizes the common impulses behind both movements (as well as Limonov’s contrarianism). Carrere spares no one in his vivid depiction of the chaos and confusion of Boris Yeltsin’s regime.
Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context (University of Wisconsin Press), edited by Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
Controlled by state-appointed officials, the Russian Orthodox Church was a prop of czarist authority before the Bolshevik Revolution. And yet, as shown in this collection, many contrary currents were at work in the laity and clergy. Essays show how Russian Orthodoxy converged with progressive political ideas, based on its understanding of human dignity and freedom of conscience. Many believers in the early 20th century were actively engaged with modern aesthetics, philosophy and science. Thinking Orthodox is valuable for cutting through false assumptions about Russian culture and society that have longed reigned in American academia.
