In Search of Russian Modernism. By Leonid Livak,. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix, 375 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $54.95, hard bound.

In Search of Russian Modernism. By Leonid Livak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix, 375 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. $54.95, hard bound.

“Russian modernism,” to borrow a line from Vladimir Nabokov, one of its practitioners, is a phrase that means nothing without quotes. As Leonid Livak shows in this engaging study, even “modernism” itself, without the geographical specifier, is problematic. Although now widely used in scholarship, the term was accepted only hesitantly by Anglo-American writers and only reluctantly applied in France and Germany. In the Russian context its use is further complicated by questions of dates (beginning, end) and geography (the divide between Soviet and émigré communities).

Livak comes to the pursuit of this elusive target well-qualified, having earlier published major studies of Russian émigré literature in the European modernist context, How It was Done in Paris: Russian Émigré Literature and French Modernism (2003) and Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay (2010). The occasion for setting off on this new search is the “Copernican revolution” (2) in our understanding of fin-de-siècle and early twentieth-century literature made possible by the opening of archives in the post-Soviet era, and with that the opportunity we now have to depoliticize our discussions of Russian modernism and provide an account which transcends the “pre-Soviet/Soviet/ant-Soviet” paradigm historically dominant in the field (3). Livak's approach this time is to treat Russian modernism not as a series of canonical works but as a “culture,” which he defines, following Clifford Geertz, as an “evolving system of values, ideas, practices, and conventions…suffusing human experience with meaning” (7). What emerges from this perspective is the “story of a self-identified and self-conscious community” (22) united in particular by a “sense of staring into a spiritual, cultural, and social chasm between past and present” (9). In a further revisionist move, Livak treats his object of study as a “cartography” (25), asking not so much “what” was Russian modernism but “where” and “when” it was.

One consequence of herding disparate works and movements into a single culture is to erase otherwise useful boundaries, such as that between “modernism” (which promoted art for its own sake, as a self-sufficient value) and the “avant-garde” (which sought to displace...