Dějiny hmotné kultury by Josef PetráňReview by: Zdenek SalzmannSlavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 665-666Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697584 .

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Book Reviews 665

model produced new cleavages-within the party system, on the parliamentary level, in and between organized interest groups, and within the corporate system as a whole. Many of these problems are analyzed in this book.

Even if one does not agree with the general bias of most of the articles, this book pro- vides interesting insight into the problems of the German unification process.

GERT-JOACHIM GLAESSNER Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin

Dejiny hmotne kultury. Ed. Josef Petran. Vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2. Prague: Statni pedagogicke nakladatelstvf, 1985. Vol. 2, pts. 1 and 2. Prague: Karolinum, 1995, 1997. Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, each approximately 1,000 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. Illustrations. Plates. Photographs. Tables. Maps. Hard bound.

This multipart work was written by Josef Petrafi in collaboration with six other historians and two prehistorians; still others prepared very rich illustrative documentation. Those who consider history a chronological record of events shaped by kings, queens, aristocrats, revolutionary leaders, and other individuals of consequence will find this four-part set refreshingly different. Dijiny hmotne kultury is not only the history of artifacts but also, and especially, an account of the culture of everyday life in the Czech lands (roughly today's Czech Republic) from prehistory to the end of the fifteenth century (volume 1, parts 1 and 2) and from the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth century (volume 2, parts 1 and 2). Volume 1 was published in communist Czechoslovakia in 1985 and, as one would expect, contains an inevitable compliment to the country's official ideology (e.g., the introductory section of chapter 1 is titled "The Main Features of the Marxist-Leninist Conception of Culture" and the chapter bibliography is heavily weighted in favor of Soviet publications). The discussion of material culture is not easily susceptible to ideological distortion, how- ever, and the text that follows the two introductory chapters would not have been appre- ciably different even if it had been published after the "velvet" revolution in 1989, as was volume 2.

The coverage is broad. Chapter 3 of volume 1 covers prehistory of the area in the con- text of European prehistory and then continues with Lhe Old Slavic period and early Middle Ages up to the end of the twelfth century. For the period for which written sources are either scarce or nonexistent, the authors use archaeological evidence to reconstruct the economic conditions and social lifestyle of the early Czech people who settled in the present location sometime during the sixth century, as well as of those who preceded them there. Like the followers of the "new archaeology" (credited to Lewis Binford [1960s]), the authors strive to be not only descriptive but also explanatory, to study culture as a system of interconnected subsystems, and to use specimens of material culture as stepping-stones to the appreciation of the way of life of a group or a society.

For example, chapter 5 dealing with "consumption" during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries is subdivided into five sections-"Diet," "Clothing," "Footwear," "Cosmetic Care," and "Entertainment." Illustrations abound of various cooking utensils and articles of tableware; work and festive clothes of both villagers and city dwellers including head- gear, footwear, and toilet articles; tournament armor; musical instruments; children's toys, table-game pieces (dice, chessmen); and other items. The accompanying text not only refers to these various artifacts but also discusses both those aspects of material culture that have not been preserved and activities associated with material culture: how meals were prepared in the homes of both the poor and the rich, what foods were suitable for fasting, and what was served for sumptuous meals; dining etiquette; changing fashions and the use of perfume and makeup; styles of dancing; erotic symbolism; and so on and on. One learns that the fourteenth century was not so different from our own times: taking care of one's complexion and hair included the use of precious oils from roses, eucalyptus, lemons, cedar, lavender, and other vegetable sources. Many readers will no doubt be amazed at the elaborate nature of nonaristocratic domestic life some seven hundred years ago.

An outstanding feature of the set is its pictorial documentation. There are many hun-

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666 Slavic Review

dreds of photographs, line drawings, reproductions from old manuscripts and books, and 64 color plates. The captions accompanying a line drawing, photograph, or map are quite frequently a paragraph in length, to allow for adequate description of the item shown and to explain its function.

There is not much one would wish to add to or to change in this comprehensive and lavishly illustrated work, but what this reviewer has missed is an index of place-names to supplement the detailed subject indexes. A place-name index would help readers easily locate-textual or illustrative material concerning places they are familiar with or have spe- cial interest in.

To sum up: The editor and main contributor to this work is to be congratulated for helping us appreciate how the people in the villages, towns, and manors of the Czech lands lived and worked from the earliest times to the onset of the Czech national revival at the end of the eighteenth century.

ZDENEK SALZMANN Northern Arizona University

Milan Kundera and Feminism: Dangerous Intersections. ByJohn O'Brien. New York: St. Mar- tin's Press, 1995. xiii, 165 pp. Notes. Index. $39.95, hard bound.

John O'Brien's Milan Kundera and Feminism is the first feminist book-length study of Milan Kundera's controversial novels. Employing a postmodernist perspective that permits op- posing principles to exist in a mutual dialectic of affirmation and denial, O'Brien takes issue with the usual school of Kundera criticism that represents his work as either sexist or postmodernist, showing how it mediates between both polarities, at once antagonistic to-and empathetic with-the status of women. O'Brien deftly negotiates this delicate, paradoxical terrain by dividing his book into two distinct halves. In chapter 1-entitled "(Mis) representing Women"-he points out those manifold places in Kundera's narratives where women are reduced to being the object of male power and are trapped within clas- sically Aristotelian binaries such as whore/madonna, beauty/ugliness, male friendship/ female antagonism. In chapter 2 ("Seeing through the Opposition: Kundera, Deconstruc- tion and Feminism"), the author demonstrates how the representational instability of Kundera's postmodernist aesthetic serves to dismantle these same oppositions and render him a less than clear-cut advocate of misogyny.

If O'Brien succeeds in complicating our current polarized view of Kundera as either an old-fashioned misogynist or a postmodernist who deconstructs his own binary opposi- tions, his conclusion that the truth lies somewhere between these labels begs the question how and why such a dialectical tension came to exist in the first place. In my book The Labyrinth of the Word: Truth and Representation in Czech Literature, published in the same year as O'Brien's (1995), I argued that the tension between the discordant discourses that O'Brien detects in Kundera's fiction has actually characterized much of Czech writing since the Middle Ages. Focusing on the conflict between the assertion of truth as a meta- physical or philosophical given and its problematic representation in writing, I claimed that art, as Plato reminds us, cannot have the unity, the stability, the identity, of truth. It is this self-conscious insight into the discrepancy between philosophy and art that Czech writing from the late Middle Ages to the present seems to reinforce. The problem is that so much of Czech writing, Kundera's included, has aspired to the status of philosophical truth, in spite-perhaps even because of-Kundera's overdetermined denial of the truth with a capital "T": "When I wrote my first novel, I rid myself of a certain 'lyrical' egocen- tricity, became more interested in others than in myself, and began searching not for the Truth but for the relative truths of other people. I began to view the world as a theatre in which people's relative truths meet but where the Truth with a capital T is hidden, as in Pascal's world" (quoted from Lars Kleberg, "On the Border: Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, " Scando-Slavica 30 [1984]: 71). It does not require a deconstructive genius to notice that this disclaimer asserts what it purports to deny: if Kundera has given

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