The Vlachs: The History of a Slavic People. by T. J. WinnifrithReview by: John KolstiSlavic Review, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 527-528Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2499042 .

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Book Reviews 527

volume History of Tartu University published in 1982. No scholar from the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic came to Marburg for the symposium, but the absence of a detailed discussion of the activities of students and professors in Vilnius is partly compensated for by a balanced review of recent exile and Soviet Lithuanian literature concerning the commemoration of the anniversary of Vilnius University (provided by Povilas Reklaitis of the Herder Institute). As one would expect, the majority of the participants in the symposium were West Germans, but six scholars from North America and one from Sweden also contributed essays to the collection.

Unfortunately, no Pole participated in the symposium's discussions of the major contribu- tions to learning and enlightenment made by the Polish academy-university at Wilno between 1579 and 1832 and during the 1920s and 1930s. What the editors of this volume describe as the "considerable preponderance" of Tartu over Riga and Vilnius in their collection is, however, at least partly justified by the importance of the University of Tartu as a leading European center of learning attended by Baltic Germans, Estonians, Latvians, and many other nationalities through- out the period from 1802 to 1918.

The careful editing and the quality of the scholarship of this volume's essays are to be noted. The authors of the essays bring out very well the conflicting nature of what nineteenth century and twentieth century society has expected of its universities: loyalty to the state; the preparation of competent officials and administrators, engineers, physicians, pharmacists, and farm and ag- ricultural and business managers and organizers; and original contributions to international sci- ence and scholarship. On the whole, these collected articles offer a comparative rather than a narrowly institutional history of Baltic education; and they provide materials and conclusions of value for the further comparative study of European education and of its influence on modern society.

EDWARD C. THADEN

University of Illinois, Chicago

THE VLACHS: THE HISTORY OF A SLAVIC PEOPLE. By T. J. Winnifrith. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. viii, 180 pp. Maps. Cloth.

The first three chapters of this book escort the reader through a landscape marked by often vague, seldom unbiased historical references to a people "speaking a dialect derived from Latin" and "known in general by themselves as Aroumanians" (p. 1). The origins of these people are no less a puzzle today than their survival in northern Greece, where 30,000 still live, and in neigh- boring Albanian and Slav territories, where 20,000 more are to be found. The twelve maps at the end of the book show little change in the location of Vlach communities (many visited by the author) from Roman and Byzantine times to the present. Given the problems presented by Bal- kan sources with political axes to grind or territorial claims to propagandize, how is one to ex- plain the survival of a Latin language in areas Rome conquered last and abandoned first-a lan- guage that has "no literature worth speaking of" (p. 36) and is not even a "good vehicle" for ballads or oral history.

In chapter 4, the author presents problems of historical references to the Vlachs, problems for the most part avoided by non-Balkan studies from the 1770s (for example, see Wace and Thompson, Nomads of the Balkans, London, 1914). One such difficulty is that any study of the Vlachs is connected with questions dealing with the origins of Romanian nationhood. The Greeks hold that Roman road garrisons and the local Greek population formed the Vlach people, with "proper" Vlachs still living near the roads in the Pindus region, as opposed to the pockets found farther away in Albania and Macedonia. The current Romanian view allows for the Dacian Romanians and Macedonian Romanians to be considered separate entities, but it does not allow the possibility that Romanians are Vlachs who left Byzantine territory and migrated north across the Danube frontier, an explanation that Hungarian historians are quite ready to accept. The Yugoslavs (Serbs?) see the Vlachs in Macedonia as late arrivals from the south-just as Alba-

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528 Slavic Review

nians in Kosovo are viewed as late intruders from the west-into districts cleared by the Turks. The Bulgarians and Albanians, whose language "also has a Latin element" (p. 60), seem to take little or no interest in an ethnic minority that could make territorial claims of its own on still disputed areas. Having escorted us through this mined landscape, the author offers a perfectly reasonable compromise view: The Vlachs have lived throughout their recorded history in areas dominated by Greek rather than Latin culture, and Vlach migration into northern Greece over the past two hundred years has followed traditional communication routes from Vlach settlements in Albania, not from across the Danube.

Chapters 5 to 10 offer an overview of Vlach wanderings in and out of Greek, Roman, Byz- antine, and Turkish history, with four hundred years of silence between the time of Slav migra- tions into ancient Illyria, Macedonia, and Dacia, and the establishment of Magyar and Bulgar states along the Danube. The migration patterns of Byzantium's and later Turkey's polyglot Vlachs seem no less a mystery than their role, if any, in the struggle to establish Greek, Roma- nian, and Albanian national states, even churches. The outcome of these struggles signaled the beginning of the end of Vlach communities in the Balkans. What insurrections, two world wars, and a disastrous civil war in Greece failed to do, assimilation, urbanization, and material prog- ress behind strong national boundaries seem destined to do. Which is reason enough, according to the author, to study what is still left of a vanishing Balkan people.

For now, the Vlachs or Koutzovlachs or Cincars or Aroumanians still remain faceless. More studies in many disciplines, the author affirms, are necessary to place them in clearer focus. The bibliography affords the researcher at least a starting point.

JOHN KOLSTI

University of Texas, Austin

PUSCHKINBILDER: BULGAKOW, TYNJANOW, PLATONOW, SOSCHTSCHENKO, ZWETAJEWA. By Nyota Thun. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1984. 252 pp.

All five of the authors Nyota Thun has chosen for her study were mavericks in one way or an- other. All suffered oppression, and all turned to Pushkin to formulate their attitudes to literary work under the conditions of a zhestokii vek. The main achievement of Thun's monograph is that it demonstrates how the five writers' images of Pushkin-gleaned from poems, plays, fiction, and essays-arose from their own social and cultural environment.

Mikhail Bulgakov's drama about Pushkin, Poslednie dni, was intended for the 1937 com- memoration of Pushkin's death and was accepted by the Moscow Art Theater; it was not allowed to be performed, however, until 1943, three years after the author's death. Drawing on commen- taries by Bulgakov's contemporaries and later generations of critics, Thun argues cogently that the play's central themes are the position of a poet in an autocratic society, the genesis of the work from the poet's life, and the possibilities of a work surviving after the poet's death. The most striking feature of its dramatic structure is that Pushkin is almost entirely absent. Only occasionally does he flit like a shadow across the back of the stage, eventually making his entry in his coffin-unseen. Yet, as Thun points out, he remains the center of the drama-all the other characters are defined by their attitudes to him. Pushkin's absence from the stage, implying that he is unable to contribute to the development of the plot, underscores the inevitability of his fate. Thun's discussion of these features is convincing, but in my opinion she misses the point when it comes to the issue of the survival of the poet's work. The fact that quotations from Pushkin are scattered throughout the play does not indicate the poet's work will survive. A lot depends on who quotes him and how he is quoted. It seems to me that Bulgakov's bitterest irony comes when he despairs about the future uses of his own work: He gives Pushkin's lines not only to the police spy Bitov, but also to d'Anthes* and Nicholas I. The most conspicuous instance of this ironic reallocation of lines occurs in the second act when the tsar attempts to seduce Pushkin's wife Natal'ia. The tsar exclaims in Pushkinian tones that he would love to get away from it all and rest

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