Despite clocking in at just shy of 170 pages of body text, this is an impressively and substantively sweeping book. Its chronological scope spans the eighteenth through twenty-first centuries. Its range of works, authors, genres, and movements match informative breadth with erudite depth. Its varied approaches to the book's central premise show the insightful agility of a seasoned scholar. That premise is expressed in the concise, yet menacing, term “totality” and developed in a series of chapters with tantalizingly suggestive titles (“The Epidemic,” “The Panorama,” “The Orchestra,” and “The Market). In short, it is a book that uses a compelling number of examples to advance a singular idea about the place of Russian literature in broader social, political, cultural, and ideological contexts.
The Vortex That Unites Us is a study of the systems and structures that often operate in the background of literary production. More so, it is about how authors and the works they create interact, intersect, and align with those structures. The totalizing forces that Jacob Emery enumerates in his “conceptual anthologizing of the Russian canon” (2) are admittedly diverse and the works that are used to ground those discussions are intentionally disparate. Yet certain thematic and semantic threads help pull together these wide-ranging texts and ideas and combat the centrifugal forces that could potentially fragment the book into a half a dozen distinct versions of totality. The superimposition of the political, the social, and the cultural onto the literary serves as a repeated framework that provides consistency and an overarching cohesion to the different case studies presented here.
The twentieth century—so dominated by visions and versions of totality in utopian ideologies, universalizing art, and hegemonic capitalism—offers the most clear-cut and overtly ambitious comprehensive systems, and those are the subject matter of the final three chapters of The Vortex That Unites Us. Emery moves roughly chronologically through the century beginning with the Futurists’ ambitions for international unity (with all of its linguistic, economic, and intellectual connotations) as seen in the common language of zaum. The alignment of transrational speech and the Soviet championing of world literature offers Emery a deep well of theoretical and literary material to set the stage for other twentieth-century developments. Primary among those is the Stalin era totalitarian regime. Our guide through the morass of art, culture, and politics in this chapter is Osip Mandel΄shtam, whose complicated interactions with both the state and the reader provide Emery with visions of totality in unexpected places.
The self appointed carrier of culture through the long night of Soviet barbarism, Mandelstam even before the revolution was wont to metaphorize, his poetry as a fragile vessel lost in the vastness of world history—a message in a bottle floating in the ocean of time or an ancient clay jar buried in archaeological layers—which paradoxically contains a totality as vast as the medium in which it is tossed or embedded (120).
The ubiquity of totalizing worlds did not stop at the edge of the iron curtain but pursued the nomadic life of the émigré writer. The book's final chapter reads Nabokov's Lolita as a study in the manipulative powers of language and the ways commercial culture allows literature to “ensnare [its] audience so fully in a false reality that the purchaser will take the material product for a transcendental value” (149). The messy boundaries of art and reality continue to haunt the reader and enmesh them in structures and systems designed to take over all aspects of life.
These final three chapters, rooted in the twentieth century, provide a lens through which the first two chapters can be viewed. This hindsight illuminates how, in opening with Batiushkov, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Lev Tolstoi, Emery utilizes the aesthetic, cultural, and political terms of the nineteenth century to anticipate the totalities of the twentieth. Readings of the scientific and religious discourses of the era are paired with the more modern perspectives of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Konstantin Sorokin. The resulting folding of time amplifies a sense of the inescapable presence of deterministic structures and universalizing projects. The Vortex That Unites Us is a testament to the productive interactions between literature and the world and the new and insightful observations that come through embracing the capaciousness of art.
