The jacket copy of The Garnett Book of Russian Folk and Anonymous Verse says that this anthology is “aimed at interested readers of poetry, those with a rudimentary knowledge but strong interest in Russian, or university students of Russian literature.” It will also be of interest, the publishers tell us, because it not only illustrates Russian folk verse, but also “the convergence, as well as divergence, of Russian folk traditions from neighboring folk cultures of Europe and Asia.” And finally, we are assured that “care has been taken to establish the most authoritative texts of the Russian originals,” and that “the fullest use has been made of the textological and research work in Russia of the last twenty-five years” (front flap of jacket). It is worth quoting this at length as a measure of what the anthology is supposed to do, and what it actually does.
First, one must note that this is probably the most wide-ranging anthology of Russian traditional verse available to English-speaking students. As the table of contents shows (pages 423-434, and only in Russian), the anthology covers not only the heroic epics and religious folk poetry that dominate other anthologies of Russian folk verse, it also has ballads, historical folk songs (though these are often ballad-like), ritual poetry (for example, wedding laments), children’s poetry, and satirical quatrains, among others. Unfortunately, it leaves out an interesting recent genre of children’s verse, horror or sadistic verse, because these poems can be traced to specific authors. Yet even though the verse can be traced to specific authors, it has already begun to show the variation expected of folk poetry, and thus has been fully integrated into the corpus of Russian folk poetry.
The translations that accompany the texts are useful ponies for the Russian originals, thus fulfilling the anthology’s aim to make the poetry available in the original to those, like the reviewer, whose Russian is rudimentary or rusty, but who want to work through the Russian originals. Anna Pilkington’s translations are very useful, though one does have to watch out for occasional switches in the poetry where she has changed the word order so that the word order in the English is not the same as the Russian original, or where she does not translate lines that are in parallel, thus breaking up an important stylistic aspect of Russian folk poetry. But thankfully these infelicities are few, and thus Pilkington’s translations can be recommended for both the student of Russian and the English-speaking folklorist with no Russian who wants to know more about traditional Russian verse.
But does the anthology achieve its other goal, to illustrate “the convergence, as well as divergence, of Russian folk traditions from neighboring folk cultures of Europe and Asia”? The answer here must, unfortunately, be no. There is only a very brief introduction, and there are no notes or commentary to the individual texts. This is a rich selection of texts, but we are given nothing to contextualize the texts within Russian or comparative folklore.
And what of the assurance that “care has been taken to establish the most authoritative texts of the Russian originals”? This is, of course, something of an anomaly for the folklorist, who does not depend on “authoritative texts” but rather examines the many versions of the texts as they occur in their traditional contexts. There is thus no need for authoritative texts in the sense of edited texts representing a putative original, though of course we want to know that the texts were collected from traditional sources, and not from, for example, the many rewritten versions available (these, of course, are an interesting study in their own right). But we don’t have that information about the texts in Pilkington’s anthology; these texts may have come from scholarly folkloristic sources, or from popular anthologies, or elsewhere, but we don’t know because she does not indicate her sources.
And because Pilkington does not indicate her sources, it is impossible to say whether or not “the fullest use has been made of the textological and research work in Russia of the last twenty-five years.” There is little in the brief introduction to indicate that this is the case. Pilkington only hints at what scholarship or anthologies of Russian folk verse she has used, as, for example, in three paragraphs on page viii, where she names a number of the great scholars of Russian traditional verse, but gives no bibliographical information about their works.
This anthology meets its goal of providing a wide-ranging set of texts for the student of Russian and for other readers interested in Russian folk verse, but it fails in its other goals, and that will limit its usefulness as an anthology. For the casual reader it will provide an interesting overview of the various genres of Russian traditional verse, and it will help the student who wants to read Russian traditional verse in the original make the transition to reading the verse in Russian. However, because Pilkington includes neither a commentary on the language or a lexicon for the stories, nor gives proper bibliographical guidance to the scholarship on Russian traditional verse, these students will not have the kind of help they should have.
As useful as this anthology is, then, as a wide-ranging collection of texts, this usefulness is mitigated by its significant shortcomings. In this day of the Internet, perhaps the Garnett Press could create a file on their website that would give the missing information, and offer a better introduction to Russian traditional verse for the volume as well. With those lacks liquidated, this would be an outstanding anthology of Russian traditional verse.
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[Review length: 939 words • Review posted on March 16, 2016]