Soviet Hieroglyphics. Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia by Nancy CondeeReview by: Richard TaylorThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 738-739Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4212264 .

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738 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

references to Freud were removed, and was published at a time when the archive had not been fully studied, which meant that some texts were left out or misunderstood. What is more, as there was no existing biography of Eizenshtein at the time (Shklovskii's work had not yet been published), texts were broken up to give a chronological presentation, disrupting the logic of Eizenshtein's thoughts.

Beyond the Stars is clearly a marked improvement on that earlier publication, despite the fact that it is an abridged version of Yo!. Disappointingly, if defensibly, the appendix to the German edition 'Profiles' has been left out on the grounds that these earlier texts were not marked by Eizenshtein as being intended for his memoirs. The annotation is drawn essentially from two sources: Kleiman's commentary for the German edition and the notes from the Russian selected works. Ignoring unfortunate factual errors such as the confusion of the Strastnoi monastery with the Church of Christ the Saviour, it offers useful clarifications for the non-specialist English reader. The main drawback of this edition, however, lies in its omission of the textological explanations preceding each text in the German edition, which placed each fragment within the overall context of the memoirs.

Despite quibbles over presentation, notably the poor quality of the illustrations, Beyond the Stars is a welcome addition to the available literature on Russian and Soviet cinema, offering a unique insight into one of cinema's more colourful characters. However, anybody attempting serious study of Eizenshtein's voluminous legacy must now wait for the forthcoming Russian edition of the text, included in a state programme of publications to mark cinema's centenary. This promises an enlarged and more sophisticated commentary, and will incorporate previously unpublished texts including a premature obituary for Meierkhol'd and a text on Orozco, making it the most complete edition to date.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies JAMES MANN

University of London

Condee, Nancy (ed.). Soviet Hieroglyphics. Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Centugy Russia. Indiana University Press with the British Film Institute, Blooming- ton, Indianapolis and London, I 995. xxviii + i 8o pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index.

SOVIET HIEROGLYPHICS is something of a misnomer for this mixed collection of essays, since a significant part of the volume deals with the post-Soviet period, and the entire volume with the period of transition. Only Mikhail Yampolsky's stimulating piece entitled 'In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time' directly addresses the questions implied by the title. Rather, Soviet Hieroglyphics (the product of a conference held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London in I993, but a volume from which the School is conspicuously absent) represents a snapshot in time, a record of various moments in the transition of Russia from its Soviet to post-Soviet period, whatever that comes ultimately to entail.

As with many conference volumes, the papers in this edition are of varying accessibility, quality and interest, although Nancy Condee makes a heroic,

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REVIEWS 739

and largely successful, attempt in her introduction to give them, not a coherence that is not actually there, but at least a common context, that all too clearly is. Soviet Hieroglyphics opens with a characteristically brilliant tour de force by Katerina Clark, entitled 'Aural Hieroglyphics?', which examines the role of sound in recent Russian films and makes a number of fascinating observations on sound, especially music, in the films of the I930S. Clark's essay makes one realise that a monograph on sound and music in the history of Russian and Soviet cinema is long overdue.

The second most stimulating contribution is that from Yampolsky men- tioned above. Although not as polished as his other published pieces in English, 'In the Shadow of Monuments' encourages the reader to look at the remnants of Stalinist monumentalism as essentially monumentalist monuments to a monumentalist time. His remarks on the absence of such monuments from the Kremlin are fascinating, and the reader will never walk the cobbles of Red Square with equanimity again!

In their concluding essay on 'The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture' Condee and Vladimir Padunov provide a comprehensive, but somewhat breathless, account of the changing iconography of Russia, although the piece is, perhaps inevitably, exclusively Moscow-centric. One wonders what the average Russian citizen in the provinces might make of the scandal sheets that feature 'the fattest striptease artiste "She's paid not to take her clothes off!"'? This intriguing avenue of research is, perhaps understandably, not explored! But this omission does raise the question of how superficial or skin- deep the hieroglyphics under discussion really are.

The other contributions are of only passing interest. The essay on the television coverage of the August i 99I coup is competent, but rather pedestrian: 'Documentary Discipline. Three Interrogations of Stanislav Govorukhin' veers too much towards the pretentious at the expense of the illuminating. Susan Larsen's analysis of Muratova's A Change of Fate is at the same time both overdescriptive and disappointingly elusive. The weakest contribution is Helena Goscilo's 'The Gendered Trinity of Russian Cultural Rhetoric Today or the Glyph of the H[i]eroine'. Her study of the gendered glyphs is so thoroughly decontextualized that one might apply her remarks on Mikhail Kuraev's Captain Dikshtein that he 'denarrativized "history as master plot" into random components, not only alinear but also ultimately unknowable (with both story [fabula] and plot [siuzhet] eluding certitude)' - to her own narrative. Like Kuraev, she replaces 'causality with fortuitous sequentiality' (both quotations from page 73). This is not history, but nor is it coherent analysis, and this is a great shame, because there must be both something worth saying about the subject and better ways of saying it.

So, Soviet Hieroglyphics is uneven, but will almost certainly be seen in due course as an important stepping stone in the examination of the culture of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, a marker towards more specialized research in monograph form, rather like Bolshevik Culture and The Culture of the Stalin Period, with which Condee compares it in her introduction.

Department of Politics RICHARD TAYLOR

University of Wales, Swansea

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