American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Review Author(s): Yvonne Howell Review by: Yvonne Howell Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), pp. 555-556 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/309879 Accessed: 25-07-2016 15:56 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Slavic and East European Journal This content downloaded from 141.166.39.62 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Reviews 555 quial Russian of the eighteenth century. L'vov's nonstandard uses of words, colloquialisms, and phonetic spellings, wisely preserved in this edition and accompanied by notes when necessary, provide material for study of developments and variations in Russian pronunciation or grammar. The narrative side of his work is worth including in studies of Russian travel literature. Those interested in L'vov's general aesthetic views or accomplishments in nearly any area, whether architecture or poetry and music, will find his impressions in this diary most helpful for further analysis of his role in late eighteenth-century Russian culture. Probably this diary would reach a larger audience, particularly of art historians, if it were translated into yet another language, such as English, Italian, or French. Nevertheless, this well presented and thoroughly documented text expands knowledge and provides long-needed material for understanding L'vov as a citizen of the European and Russian artistic world. Alisa Gayle Mayor, Brown University Cynthia A. Klima, State University of New York at Geneseo Leo Tolstoy. A Calendar of Wisdom. Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul. Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts. Trans. Peter Sekirin. New York: Scribner, 1997. 378 pp., $19.50 (cloth). Tolstoy spent over fifteen years collecting "the wisdom of the centuries in one book" (6). He began compiling this wisdom in written form, as quotes from the world's sacred texts and from famous (as well as obscure) artists, in 1902-1903. The first version of the resulting book was published in 1904. It was reprinted three times during his lifetime, variously titled Thoughts of Wise Men, A Circle of Reading, or The Way of Life. It is this early version of the book that made it into the 1957 Soviet edition of Tolstoy's collected works as Krug chteniia: izbrannye, sobrannye i raspolozhennye na kazhdyi den' L'vom Tolstym mysli mnogikh pisatelei ob istine, zhizni, i povedenii. However, between 1904 and 1907 Tolstoy worked on a substantially enlarged, revised version, which differed significantly from the first. Now the thoughts were grouped by topic-God, Intellect, Law, Love, Divine Nature of Mankind, Faith, Temptations, Word, Self-Sacrifice, etc.- and ordered as themes for each day, week, and month. In addition, he included a short story for the end of each week, and called these The Sunday Reading Stories. It is this second, complete version, entitled A Calendar of Wisdom, which Peter Sekirin has translated into English for the first time. Only The Sunday Reading Stories (52 vignettes in all) are not included in this translation. The book begins with January 1. The reading for each day is contained on one page, and generally consists of one to three short quotes attributed to one of Tolstoy's "great thinkers," as well as a meditation authored by Tolstoy himself. In the original, Tolstoy highlighted one quote which most succinctly conveyed the day's theme; in this book these passages are italicized. Sekirin has provided a short preface explaining the history of the Calendar's writing and publication. There is also a helpful name index with a biographical sentence identifying each thinker who is quoted (from Achinsky, Daniel to Zoroaster). The full version here translated was banned in the Soviet Union, and reappeared in post-Soviet Russian for the first time only in 1995, when it promptly sold 300,000 copies. A Calendar of Wisdom will be of considerable interest to students of Tolstoy who do not have access to the 1995 Russian language version, but it is not meant to be a scholarly edition, and it contains no bibliographical notes on the original Russian texts. Peter Sekirin's transla- tion is accurate and graceful, and Scribner has taken care to produce an elegant, gift-size volume. Please note that A Calendar of Wisdom may be located in the "Inspirational" section of your bookstore, alphabetically placed between Toler ("Little Devotional Book") and This content downloaded from 141.166.39.62 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 556 Slavic and East European Journal Toulson ("A Celtic Year"). Let us hope that in this location it will find the mass audience that Tolstoy intended it to reach. Yvonne Howell, University of Richmond Andrew Barratt and Barry P. Scherr, trans. and eds. Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 391 pp., $65.00 (cloth). "For some time now people have been publishing in the newspapers my private letters to writers. I recall that in the old days writers waited more or less patiently until a correspondent was dead and buried before they printed his letters" (277). Maksim Gorky continues in this letter of 1927 to ask the editors of Izvestia to refrain from publishing his correspondence. Since more than seventy years have passed, it may be time to look at those letters again. Andrew Barratt and Barry P. Scherr's Maksim Gorky: Selected Letters does this, as well as giving Gorky himself a second look. In fact, the editors have Gorky's best interests in mind when they state in their preface that they would like to "rescue" Gorky from interpretations that have been assigned to him by past critics. Barratt and Scherr have translated 177 of Gorky's letters, which span the writer's literary career (1889-1936). The letters were chosen to fill a gap in the works currently available in English. However, since there are more than 9,000 of Gorky's letters known to scholars, the editors were forced to select only a small fraction for presentation. According to the introduction, the editors' aim was to reduce the correspondence to a manageable number while still providing the reader with a coherent picture of the author. Letters that were too specific in regard to editorial instructions or those that were repetitive in their content were eliminated. The editors chose letters that highlight crucial events in Gorky's life, letters that show the intimate side of the writer, and those that help to illuminate Gorky's dealings with the Soviet government (this last group only recently published in Russian). The broader rationale for this book is to encourage a reinterpretation of Gorky. As the editors argue in the preface, the two existing approaches to Gorky by scholars have done the writer a disservice. Soviet critics followed a prescribed model in dealing with the "Father of Socialist Realism" while nonSoviet critics attempted to tear down this edifice. The letters are divided into six sections that approximate shifts in Gorky's life and career. Each begins with an introduction that is meant to place the letters in historical context and highlight important moments in the correspondence. The letters follow in chronological order and touch on different facets of the writer's life such as: Gorky's personal relationship with his first wife E. P. Volzhina (Peshkova); his correspondence with various writers (Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Andreev, H. G. Wells, etc.); and his dealings with both Lenin and Stalin. Because the reader may not be acquainted with all of the historical events and personages mentioned in the letters, there are extensive notes, which explain and clarify. The letters are printed in full, with asterisks to mark passages which were left out of Soviet published versions. If the purpose of this book is to generate interest in Gorky, then it is successful. The introductions are the best feature of the book and could be read, without the letters, as a good primer on the different stages in the writer's life. However, there is a feeling that presenting Gorky's epistolary legacy is such a monumental task that it cannot be satisfied with just one book of 177 letters. Among the book's best features are Gorky's letters to Peshkova, yet there are not enough of them to provide a totally coherent presentation. This is also the case with other correspondence, such as the letters to or about Bunin, Artsybashev, and Pil'niak. The issue of Gorky's relationship to Lenin and Stalin also whets the appetite but the letters do not totally satisfy. (With 9,000 letters in existence, there was probably no other choice unless they This content downloaded from 141.166.39.62 on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:56:57 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms