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Knighton, Mark
Maria Rubins. Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ix, 302 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00, cloth.

Maria Rubins offers a comprehensive account of two separate traditions of ecphrastic writing: one culminating in the French Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s and the other in Russian Acmeism, starting from 1911. She settles on a simple and flexible definition of ecphrasis as a "type of text," regardless of genre, which describes a work of visual art. The introductory chapter, perhaps the best in the book, gives a brief survey of some classic texts and ends with a "structural model of ecphrasis," a concise and illuminating schema which takes into account virtually all of the structural elements that may be found in texts that have pictures, sculpture, or architecture as their subject. Rubins does not draw the line at ecphrasis, however, and deals with pictorialism in the broadest sense, from the use of colour epithets to almost any sort of visually evocative language.

One of the attractions of ecphrasis for poets is the opportunity it offers to meditate on the nature of art itself, yet Rubins downplays this "metapoetic" dimension, especially among the Parnassians, who valued it more as an escape from Romantic subjectivity or from a sense of historical decline into a world rendered clear, stable and durable by art. Different writers have put painting, sculpture and architecture to very different uses, and the ecphrastic treatment of each medium has its own traditions and conventions. Rather than providing a systematic analysis of the uses to which poets have put the various media, Rubins tends to address these matters ad hoc as they arise in her readings of poetic texts.

Having at least broached most of the theoretical issues involved, Rubins launches into a survey of the French tradition of pictorialism, concentrating on the work of the Parnassians Heredia, Leconte de Lisle, Banville and especially Gautier. Baudelaire is also enlisted as an honorary member. She deals quickly with pre-Romantic French literature, then singles out Hugo, especially in Les Orientales, and Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme as immediate influences on the Parnassians. Among distinctly Parnassian features she lists neoclassical respect for clarity and form and a preference for the distinct outlines of the visual arts as opposed to "insubstantial," evanescent music, the art form especially favoured by the Romantics. Stasis and clarity are enlivened by eclectic cultural references: orientalism, exoticism and a fresh approach to the classical and medieval visual legacy.

The "Parnassian roots of the Acmeist movement," already well attested in both primary and secondary sources, are the subject of the third chapter. The influence of Parnasse is seen primarily in the Acmeists' esteem for technique and craftsmanship over inspiration, in their emulation of the visual and plastic arts and in their fondness for metaphors involving architecture and stone as the archetypal artistic medium. Other affinities between Parnasse and Acmeism include an admiration for Francois Villon, a fascination with medieval art, and the cultivation of the sonnet form. Partly in reaction to the metaphysical orientation of their Symbolist elders, the Acmeists favoured organicist metaphors for creativity. Rubins does not see this as a legacy of Parnasse, but suggests that it does reflect contemporary styles in the visual arts, especially art nouveau. As with the Parnassians, the cult of form went together, at least in Gumilev, with an appetite for exoticism.

By this point, the case for Parnassian influence on the Acmeists, incontrovertible as it is, begins to sound overstated, but Rubins corrects the imbalance in the following two chapters by pointing out that Parnassian elements had already been thoroughly assimilated by the Symbolists, especially those of the first wave and especially by Briusov, who managed to be both a Parnassian after the fact and an Acmeist avant la lettre. Thus the Acmeists had the advantage of a stereoscopic view of Parnassian aesthetics.

The background to Acmeism is further fleshed out in a "Trio from the Acmeist Entourage: Annensky, Voloshin and Kuz'min." All three poets were conversant with French traditions and had a very sophisticated approach to visual art, and they incorporated it into their poetry to a greater degree than perhaps any of the Symbolists except Briusov. Thus the immediate Russian context out of which Acmeism arose seems to have been richer in its imaginative engagement with the visual arts than Parnasse itself.

Among the many other examples taken from pre-Acmeist Russian literature are Tolstoy's use of portraiture in Anna Karenina, Gogol's demonic "Portrait," and Holbein's "Descent from the Cross" in The Idiot. Rubins sensibly does not linger over the most famous example of ecphrasis in the nineteenth century, Pushkin's Bronze Horseman, but distinguishes it from many other instances of literary statues coming to life: "the animation of statues in Pushkin is a fact of life, albeit a supernatural one, and not a rhetorical device to indicate how lifelike the sculpture appears."

Most surprising is the omission of any reference to Baratynskii's version of Pygmalion in "Skul'ptor" (1841), a crucial link in the tradition of sculptural metaphor from Ovid and Michelangelo up to the Symbolists, who valued its insights into the erotic element of artistic creativity and the interrelationship between medium, content, and form. Erotic and gender-determined aspects of visual perception figure in Rubins' analyses of certain texts, notably Gautier's "A une robe rose," Gumilev's "Perseus" and some poems of Akhmatova in which her lyric persona confronts a rival beauty in statues or portraits.

The last and longest chapter is a catalogue of the diverse uses to which ecphrasis and pictorialism are put in the work of Gumilev, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Komarovsky, Odoevtseva and Georgy Ivanov. As in the rest of the book there is a vast range of references here: Persian miniatures and Chinese poetry (via Judith Gautier) in Gumilev; the vogue for Italy inherited from the Symbolists; japonisme and art nouveau in Akhmatova; architecture and the cinema in Mandelstam and neoclassical statuary in Komarovsky, Ivanov and Odoevtseva. A recurrent theme in Rubins' remarks is the Acmeists' use of visual metaphor as a reflection of their "nostalgia for world culture," and a means of recapturing and enlivening the cultural heritage through dynamic language and stable forms. There is an inadvertent diminuendo effect in this chapter as it moves from major to minor figures and we end up with Komarovsky, Odoevtseva and the early Georgy Ivanov, in whom familiar themes are encountered in rather conventional and even hackneyed forms.

Rubins concludes by drawing a distinction between the French and Russian movements. She regards the Parnassians as escapists from contemporary life, using pictorialism to create a parallel reality of perfected forms, whereas the Acmeists used ecphrasis to bring the artistic legacy into contact with contemporary reality, to reactivate the aesthetic values of the past and thus realize a modernist aim of eclectic cultural unity.

It is difficult to summarize a book that is so extraordinarily rich in interesting detail and which touches on so many themes, and yet lacks an overall, governing argument. The structure is basically a writer-by-writer, text-by-text survey of interesting examples, with background information adduced as needed. Thus some remarks on visual features in Akhmatova lead to an excursus on japonisme in France and Russia which, though extremely interesting in itself, is out of all proportion to the few, elegant lines it was supposed to elucidate. While one would like to commend the use of versified translations (from various sources) instead of the usual prose paragraphs, the results here are too often inadequate and sometimes inept, as when pafosskij (Paphian) is rendered as "Pathian," or "alleja" as "alley." Fortunately, the same cannot be said of Rubin's prose, which is clear, brisk and unflagging. She gives us perceptive and imaginative analyses of a great many texts and is generous in providing background on the poets and contexts for their poems. This remarkably lively and readable survey is sure to launch many more closely focused studies, and the opening discussion of the structure of ecphrastic texts will no doubt become a standard reference.

Mark Knighton, Memorial University of Newfoundland

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