In this provocative new interpretation of Pushkin's most enigmatic work for the stage, Douglas Clayton makes contributions to literary history, genre studies, a domain he calls poetic or lexical semantics, and to the poet's religious-political worldview—in order of increasing vulnerability and breadth of claim. Of undisputed excellence, in this reviewer's opinion, are the opening chapters on Push kin's relation to the theater and to the dramatic genre system of European Romanticism. Chapter 2, on the “war of prefaces" waged by reformist French dramatists and especially by Victor Hugo in his 1827 forward to Cromwell, sheds much welcome light on Pushkin's sequence of unfinished, fragmentary "drafts for a preface" to Boris, which are read here almost as meditations on Hugo's concerns. It is refreshing throughout the book to have boilerplate Soviet-era misreadings refuted in such a competent way: the myth of Pushkin's passionate faith in the narod, for example, or the Marxist oversimplification of his complex working relationship with two emperors.

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.