Я знаю Юрия Николаевича Чумакова лет тридцать пять. Уже первый услышанный мной давным-давно в далекой Вологде доклад о двух посланиях к Чаадаеву свидетельствовал об оригинальном и смелом подходе к пушкинским проблемам.

С тех пор я всегда с интересом слежу за его публикациями. В новой книге собраны основные работы этого известного ученого, которого В. Непомнящий недавно вполне справедливо назвал «выдающимся филологом, глубоким и блестящим знатоком Пушкина».[1]

Ian M. Helfant. The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. xxv + 211 pp. 0810118637. Cloth.

Now that Ian Helfant's volume on gambling in nineteenth-century Russian culture has appeared, one cannot help wondering how the topic remained unaddressed by a monograph in English until this point: gambling is without question one of the master themes of Russian literature of the period. It is central to many of the liveliest episodes in the biographies and texts of its great authors, and it certainly deserves treatment alongside such others as apocalyptic thinking, suicide, holy foolishness, dueling, nihilism—we could all complete such a list, and though contents might vary somewhat, gambling is sure to be present. Helfant's book has two particular merits: his approach follows the pattern of cultural studies in ranging beyond canonical literary texts to memoirs, popular literature, anti-gambling tracts, the historical record, and what can be reconstructed of common behavioral codes among the noble class; and his interpretive framework is very sharply defined and productive. In a fairly slim study he manages to put before the reader a wide variety of material, setting familial masterpieces beside rather obscure but fascinating sources, and he applies an interpretative lens that makes this material cohere remarkably well.