Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia and Bohemia

David Cooper. Creating the Nation: Identity and Aesthetics in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia and Bohemia Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. vii, 347 pp. Notes. Works Cited. Index. $42.00, cloth.David L. Cooper's comparative study of the literary origins of Czech and Russian national identity is an illuminating work, not only because of its impressively broad, cross-cultural analysis, but even more because its fine-grained exploration of the separate Czech and Russian contexts ventures deeply into the complex details of its two interrelated subjects. The book's claim that literature and literaiy criticism were of paramount importance in the construction of national identity pushes a step too far, but any reader should come away with a clear understanding that "creating the nation" was a central concern for the early 19th-century writers, critics, and translators so lavishly discussed here.Focused on the era of Europe's literary transition from neo-classicism to romanticism, Creating the Nation downplays these traditional literary concerns, emphasizing instead the shift in Russian and Czech from literary cosmopolitanism to literaiy nationalism. Fortunately, Cooper refuses to shy away from the complexities of these subjects: he examines literary figures from the widely known to the relatively obscure, only rarely pausing to bring non- specialists up to speed. The book is steeped in the kind of technical detail that might well prompt even a literature scholar to open up a manual on versification from time to time. But Cooper's decision to favour poetical thick description, rather than make concessions to the uninitiated, is a wise choice. It enables him to open up to the attentive reader a lively view of a distinct time and place, many of the special concerns and anxieties of which have been covered over and forgotten.The book's exploration of this unfamiliar terrain is all the more impressive given its comparative context and the author's need for an extensive knowledge of both the Russian and Czech languages and cultures of two centuries ago. It is less convincing, however, with respect to its contention that literature itself went a long way toward inventing national traditions. Cooper argues that "the modern crisis in literaiy values motivated the development of modern national identities as much as any other social, political, or religious crisis that has been examined in the field of nationalism studies." Although the reader gets a sense of the weighty import of literary issues in this period, the book lacks the historical context to substantiate this point. This is a monograph in literary studies with powerful interdisciplinary implications, but it is not the sort of interdisciplinary text capable of making arguments about society, politics, or religion. …