Canadian Slavonic Papers

The Appeal of Sovereignty. Hungary, Austria and Russia. (Atlantic Studies on Society inChange No. 96) by Csaba Gombár; Elemér Hankiss; László Lengyel; György VárnaiReview by: Mark D. PittwayCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 41, No. 3/4 (SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 1999), pp. 483-484Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870117 .

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Book Reviews 483

thorough, and includes important texts that deal with Invitation to a Beheading, as well as broader studies of Nabokov's art and biography.

Barbra Churchill, University of Alberta

With the transition to political democracy in the late 1980s Hungary left the orbit of the Soviet Union and thus achieved full political sovereignty at least in the purely formal sense. At the same time all of Hungary's major political parties and public opinion have been mobilised around the effort to gain membership in the European Union. While it is far from clear that all segments of Hungarian society fully comprehend what this is likely to entail, at present even parties with national- populist political platforms enthusiastically promote Hungary's membership in this quasi-federal, supra-national body. The contributors to this volume seek to explain this apparent paradox by investigating the meaning of sovereignty for Hungarians, then viewing the country from a comparative perspective. The editors, all respected political commentators, have established a reputation as analysts of Hungarian politics. Their research group first published a collection devoted to the performance of the conservative coalition government that held power between 1990 and 1994, and then a volume dealing with the policy drift that characterised the first year of centre-left rule following the 1994 parliamentary elections. In the present volume the editors move from the analysis of events and policy formation to more fundamental, long-term questions. In order to do this they have assembled a team of political commentators, legal scholars, sociologists and historians.

All the contributions seek to relativise the concept of national sovereignty. The common thread that runs through all of the chapters is that historically national

sovereignty has always been limited by geo-political and historical circumstances. They demonstrate that this is not just a Hungarian phenomenon but is something that characterises the Austrian and Russian cases as well. Although such a conclusion i s

plausible, it does not represent a particularly earth shattering revelation. The contributors fail to engage sufficiently with the theoretical debates around the concept of national sovereignty and this leads to ambiguities and inconsistencies in their approach. Some authors define national sovereignty as the absolute sovereignty of the state even over its people. Others, especially János Mátyás Kovács in his

chapter on Austria, implicitly argue that sovereignty resides with the nation, thus

straying into debates about the nature of national identities and their historical formation. A much more explicit engagement with the theoretical debates about

sovereignty and where it resides is missing and consequently the contributions lack a solid conceptual anchor.

This is a very Hungarian book in a number of different ways. This is manifest in the chapters that deal with other countries. For example, János Mátyás Kovacs's contribution on Austria, though stimulating, occasionally makes judgements that

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLI, Nos. 3-4, September-December 1999

Csaba Gombár, Elemér Hankiss, László Lengyel and György Várnai, eds. The Appeal of Sovereignty. Hungary, Austria and Russia. (Atlantic Studies on Society in Change No. 96) Highland Lakes, NJ: Atlantic Research and Publications, 1998. vii, 330 pp. Index. $49.00, cloth.

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484 Book Reviews

border on the pejorative. All of the chapters, with the exception of those that engage directly with the problem of sovereignty in international law, are written in the quasi- journalistic style of mainstream Hungarian political commentary. Engagement with the issues raised in relation to sovereignty by international political science and contemporary history are sadly lacking in this volume. Nonetheless, this is an interesting, original and distinctive contribution to an important debate.

Mark D. Pittway, The Open University, Milton Keynes

Monika Greenleaf and Stephen Moeller-Sally, eds. Russian Subjects: Empire, Nation, and the Culture of the Golden Age. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. xiii, 449 pp. Notes. Index. $75.00, cloth. $24.95, paper.

The purpose of this collection is "to reexamine Russia's Golden Age through the lenses of empire and nation" (p. 1). To the compilers, the "Golden Age" encompasses roughly a century of Russian history, starting from the age of Catherine the Great (1762) and ending with the death of Nicholas I (1855). The focus is on how Russia's poets, playwrights, historians and men of letters who lived and wrote during this period viewed their place in a society based on autocratic rule and on what they thought about their homeland as a nation and an evolving imperial power. In short, the work addresses interrelated questions of personal and national identity.

The collection's fifteen articles are divided into four sections. The first, "Translatio Poetae: Poetics of Empire," is the largest. Harsha Ram's essay on "Russian Poetry and the Imperial Sublime" examines how the meaning of the sublime was affected by Russia's expansion eastwards and into the Caucasus during the reigns of Catherine the Great and her heirs. Seen through the poetry of the leading exponent of the "imperial sublime," G.R. Derzhavin, the objective, intellectual sublime of Lomonosov's era has become sensuous, subjective and oriental in quality. K. Hokanson's study, "Pushkin's Captive Crimea: Imperialism in the The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, " shows a similar oriental influence. In his view, Pushkin, through his traveler-narrator, reflects on how the feminine, sexualized Orient has become subservient to masculine Russia. Russians are Europeans, "but have absorbed the strength and poetic prowess of the Orient" (p. 148). Russians, through conquest, have become the heirs of the Turks and the Tatars and their subject world.

Between these articles on the literary impacts of Russian imperial expansion into the East are three essays on cultural inheritances and influence. Monika Greenleaf s "Found in Translation: The Subject of Batiushkov's Poetry," examines the classically-minded Batiushkov and his "attraction to an ahistorical epicurean world woven out of unchanging classical topoi" (p. 52). For Leslie O'Bell ("Krylov, La Fontaine, and Aesop"), Krylov is ultimately independent of his influences, which included both Aesop and La Fontaine, and the creator of a truly Russian tradition of the fable where none had existed before. Gogol, too, was an innovator. In a thought provoking article, "A la recherche du genre perdu: Fielding, Gogol, and Bakhtin's Genre Memory," Ronald D. LeBlanc applies Bakhtin's "anthropomorphic notion of

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