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264 ReviewsLOT'S WIFE AND THE VENUS OF MILO: CONFLICTING ATTITUDESTOWARDS THE CULTURE OF MODERN RUSSIA. By Boris Thomson.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1978.171 pp. $23.95.Lot's Wife is a "salty" book (defined by Webster's as "agreeably provocative")which pillories several pillars of Soviet culture, Marxism, the Marxist aesthetic,and Western rationalism in general. In the book, Professor Thomsonsuggests that there is an internal contradiction in the Marxist aesthetic whichrefuses to condemn certain keystones of Western bourgeois culture (the"Venus of Milo" of the title) while arguing that it is dangerous and evendestructive (as it was for Lot's wife) to look back at the old world. Althoughthe book aims primarily to examine the resultant contradictory attitudestowards the past in early Soviet culture, it also attempts to suggest "theimpossibility of fittingart into a Marxist framework" at all and thus to questionthe validity of a Marxist (or, for that matter, any all-encompassing) system.Thomson's book is structured on the paradoxes resulting in early Sovietculture from a dual attitude of reverence and hostility towards the culture ofthe past. The book is divided into two parts — the first more "theoretical," thesecond more practical criticism. After a brief discussion of the Marxist andpre-revolutionary Symbolist and Futurist views of the culture of the past,Thomson focuses in part 1 on Mikhail Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanov'sCorrespondence from Two Corners (which he sees as a summary of the variouspre-revolutionary debates regarding past culture) and then treats in moredetail the changes in the attitudes expressed by Alexander Blok toward theculture of the past, and, finally, the Soviet and Marxist views of art in the1920s. In part 2, Thomson argues convincingly that this dual Soviet attitude ofreverence and hostility toward past culture created, in effect, a mythic patternwith its own specific themes and imagery which can be seen in many works ofearly Soviet literature. In this section he treats works ranging from Khlebnikov'sNight Search and Bagritskii's February (which are examined in somedetail) to works by Babel, Leonov, Zamiatin, Pilniak, and Platonov. Inaddition to demonstrating the opposition of the two basic images of his title inearly Soviet literature, Thomson presents fascinating material on the role ofthe recurrent etymological pun on the name Vladimir ("ruler/possessor of theworld"), reflecting the attempt of the new Soviet culture to "possess" and"master" the old culture of the pre-revolutionary bourgeois world, and therelated image of the prostitute referring to that old culture, which was thusdepicted as attractive but dangerously syphilitic (reflecting, he might haveadded, the dangers of the old-world Venus of his title). Despite the reverencetowards the new Attila (who would destroy everything and prepare the way forthe new), "original sin" (a metaphor for the old culture which, in Leonid