Slavonic and East European Review

SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 514 Burke regards the whole undertaking as ‘a milestone in the development of the social history of language’. That is no exaggeration. UCL SSEES Simon Dixon Khagi, Sofya. Silence and the Rest: Verbal Skepticism in Russian Poetry. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2013. viii + 301 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. The paradoxicality of making a verbal construct asserting that words are inadequate has never deterred poets from such an endeavour. In her wideranging , densely argued, and somewhat earnest book, Sofya Khagi argues that the resulting texts constitute a major strand in the thematic spectrum of Russian poetry since the early nineteenth century. They stand, as Khagi is at pains to demonstrate, in a dialectical relationship with the more familiar and frequently voiced counter-claim concerning the potency, even supremacy, of the Russian poetic word. The sceptical strand, for once, does not emerge from under Pushkin’s frock coat; his Urtext in this regard, ‘Prorok’, stands on the opposite side of the argument. Khagi’s opening chapter ushers the reader through a history of inexpressibility in European philosophical thought from the Greeks to postmodernism , dwelling briefly but cogently on Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and then claiming that the equivalent strand in Russian thought (Solov´ev, Loseff, Shestov and others) is distinctively different. She then turns to the poetry, tracing the development of the verbal scepsis theme in Zhukovskii, Baratynskii and Batiushkov, before broaching what every reader of Russian poetry would surely cite as her foundational text, Tiutchev’s ‘Silentium’. The extended analysis of this poem is the first in a series of such set-pieces that gives Khagi’s book its principal strength and will make it required reading for those interested in any of the poets she discusses. Mandel´shtam, Brodsky and Kibirov each gets a chapter. The discussion of Mandel´shtam is preceded by some astute examination of the Symbolist-to-Acmeist transition, again with ampletextualsupport.‘TheHorseshoeFinder’is,justifiably,theprincipalfocus, but Khagi touches on many other relevant poems, and incorporates the poet’s prose. The chapter on Brodsky ranges through the entire oeuvre, including the essays. The Kibirov chapter concentrates particularly on ‘To Igor Pomerantsev’, but finds space for pertinent poems and prose by his conceptualist colleagues. Khagi’s use of secondary literature, neither perfunctory nor grandstanding, is impressive. The concluding chapter features a rolling barrage of rhetorical questions addressing practically all the key texts of Russian classic literature, REVIEWS 515 in prose and verse, rubbing in the perceived centrality of Khagi’s trope of inexpressibility. Not all is well with this book, though. The English reader has to struggle throughout with the unidiomatic use of articles and prepositions, a difficulty which,especiallywhencomplexphilosophicaltextsarebeingdiscussed,seriously undermines Khagi’s argument. The same goes for her translations of the poetry offered here; and Khagi has used Brodsky’s own translations of his poems, which can be even more misleading. Far too much argumentation has been demoted to the footnotes; the main text has been compressed and compacted, generally a praiseworthy idea, but here it has been taken too far. Interpretation constantly pushes at the limits that the sources will bear. In one instance there is blatant overstep: on page 54, in a letter unwisely translated here from an editor’s Russian version rather than the French original, Tiutchev is talking about writing letters, not poetry or any other kind of imaginative literature. Though Khagi grounds herself throughout in the analysis of specific verse texts, she continuously sideslips distractingly into philosophy, as adumbrated by her introductory chapter. The relationship between literary and philosophical theory and the practice of writing is held to be a mutually aware dialectic. Actually, though, has any real writer ever taken seriously such conceits as ‘the death of the author’, to take the most egregious instance? More seriously even than this, the insidious groundswell of Russian exceptionalism and particularism is disturbing; Khagi’s book abounds in claims that are unprovable and will only serve to perpetuate familiar myths rather than critically examine them. Ultimately, they rest on and are undermined by an undiscriminated view of ‘the West’, when in this context it would be equally possible to draw...