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émigré and Soviet writers, inducing in the former, at least, a “proto-existentialist mix of pessimistic resignation and stoic defiance” (131)—even as it fostered a neo-traditionalism that yielded among its products such outstanding examples of modernist metafiction as Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master i Margarita on the Soviet side (albeit unofficially), and Nabokov’s Dar in the emigration. Arguably the most substantive in the book, Chapter Four (“Navigating Russia’s Culture of Modernity”) begins in an account of the threat modernity posed to the intelligentsia, which had long seen itself in messianic terms as a self-sacrificing elite opposed to the tsarist state. Livak offers a fascinating view of the parallels between its two rebellious offspring—Marxist political culture and modernist artistic culture, whose worldviews and intentions overlapped considerably. Both militated against inferior byt or everyday reality, and one can even speak of the Nietzschean aspect of “Bolshevik leaders as artist demiurges” (159). For scholars of Soviet culture this is familiar territory—but Livak’s detailed survey of actors and ideas amounts to a far more nuanced account of the intertwining of political and aesthetic aims in Russia’s culture of modernity than, say, Boris Groys’s sketchier, if more provocative, account in The Total Art of Stalinism (1992). Chapter Five, “Russian Modernism in the Cultural Marketplace,” supplements the cultural sociology of Chapter Four with an economical-sociological account of the hard facts of money—press runs, advances, and honoraria paid by this versus that journal. Livak shows that in both the emerging market economy of the late tsarist era, in which the funding formula of thick journals quickly became obsolete, and the developing socialist economy of the Bolshevik state, where the state itself assumed the role of patron, economic factors often played a determining role in what kind of literature was written and what kind of art was produced (consider such phenomena as Vladimir Maiakovskii’s agonizing but remunerative work for ROSTA, the 1924 issue of LEF eulogizing Lenin in the guise of Formalist analysis of his verbal style, or the artist Isaak Brodskii and his transformation from modernist painter to court portraitist for the Stalin regime). As Livak himself confesses, In Search of Russian Modernism will not resolve all the conceptual and terminological issues endemic to the study of Russian modernism. But in its thoroughness and remarkable erudition it will remain an essential guide to the topic for a long time to come.