284 Slavic Review

methodologically solid, and produce valuable results. Boris Orekhov and Kirill 
Reshetnikov map thirty-one languages on the internet, working out the rules 
for success in terms of raising awareness and visibility for minor languages. 
Ekaterina Khodzhaeva explores language policy in Tatarstan and the responses 
to this policy from Russian and Tatar speakers. She concludes that the situa-
tion in the republic is far from the desirable Russian-Tatar bilingualism. In the 
final chapter in Part 3, Tamara Zhuravel΄ investigates the process of language 
loss in the Usinsk Hollow in Krasnoiarsk. The schools, Zhuravel΄ argues, are 
the central agents of language policy for minor languages, however, neither the 
schools nor the minor language speakers demonstrate enthusiasm for language 
maintenance.

Part Four deals with post-Soviet states and, somewhat less fittingly, with 
Finland. Sergei Davydov and Ol ǵa Logunova analyze the chronology and content of 
the representation of post-Soviet states on the three main channels of Russian state-
controlled television in 2011–12. The chapter shows that no community of the CIS is 
highlighted and the very name CIS is hardly used on TV. The depictions primarily 
relate to the Russian context and official visits are privileged. Overall, the authors 
argue that television reporting of the so called “near abroad” shows no interest in 
showing the various sides of life in these states. Kseniia Gusarova then explores 
Ukrainian Wikipedia. Finally, the Finish scholar Ekaterina Protassova discusses 
language policy in Finland, aiming at achieving not only Finnish and Scandinavian 
but also European identity. This goes hand in hand with the growing linguistic 
impact of their eastern neighbor, resulting in the growth of Russian language stud-
ied in Finnish schools and in an increasing visibility of Russian in the country’s 
linguistic landscape.

The book is interesting and at times, exciting, but uneven in the quality of schol-
arship and the relative relevance of the contributions. Some chapters seem to be put 
together by thorough consideration, others by a loose connection and an imprecise 
metaphor of “language tuning.” Valuable guidance to the chapter’s interpretations is 
provided by Gasan Guseinov in a useful and intelligent introduction. Despite some 
hitches, the book will be important reading for all those who are intently watching 
the tribulations of Russian language use, discursive trends, and language policies in 
the Putin era.

Lara Ryazanova-Clarke
University of Edinburgh

Khishchnyi Glaz: Novye ocherki po arkheologii vizual΄nosti. By Aleksei 
Kurbanovskii. St. Petersburg: Izdatel śtvo “ARS,” 2015. 311 pp. Appendix. 
Bibliography. Index. Plates. Photographs. RUB 800, hard bound.

doi: 10.1017/slr.2018.67

Aleksei Kurbanovskii’s book, The Predatory Eye: New Essays on the Archeolog y 
of Visuality, is an ambitious attempt to write a multicultural art history. It traces 
the development of two centuries of visual culture that falls largely within the 
discourse of western art history, and it incorporates Russia into this discourse. 
The premise of the book is that, we, as humans, are endowed with “predatory”—
desiring, selective—vision, that we see “what we want to see” (6). The form of 
the book is ambiguous. It is both a theoretical treatise and a historical summary, 
but most of all it resembles a collection of lectures on the history and theory of 
art, drawn from numerous art historical sources, mostly by western authors. It 

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/slr.2018.67&domain=pdf


285Book Reviews

is abundant in references to and quotations from these authors, beginning with 
Immanuel Kant and continuing through Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, 
to Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and 
Edward Said, among others. Western art historians and critics—such as Svetlana 
Alpers, Hans Belting, Rosalind Krauss, and Clement Greenberg—are also cited 
prolifically. Russian sources, such as Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Victor Shklovskii, 
Mikhail Bakunin, and Boris Arvatov are well-integrated into the narrative. The 
form of the book determines its content. It is a collection of articles that are 
united by a common methodology of applying contemporary theories of visuality 
to Russian material. Like some scholarly literature from Russia, it does not have 
a well-articulated argument, but rather a goal, which is to convince the reader 
of the differences of visual regimes in various cultures. To this end, the author 
weaves a chronologically-arranged narrative out of leading art historical and crit-
ical trends that have become commonplace in the field in the past thirty years. It 
begins by covering the themes of “orientalism” and “art and politics” in Russia in 
the nineteenth century; “the material and the spiritual in art” at the turn of the 
next century; “the machine aesthetics” in the early 1900s; and “the screen and 
(de)formations of vision” in contemporary art. Each trend is assigned a certain 
chronological timeframe and its own chapter.

The logic of the narrative follows the principle of dualistic opposites, formu-
lated as “textual” versus “visual” art, following Alpers, or as the discerning gaze 
of the Italian Renaissance model, which “illustrates the Albertian metaphor of 
painting as a ‘window into the world,’” (32) versus the “descriptive” model, which 
does not pronounce a judgment coming from a definite point of view but rather 
illustrates Norman Bryson’s observation in which “the spectator is an unexpected 
presence, not a theatrical audience . . . the bond with the viewer’s physique is bro-
ken and the viewing subject is now proposed and assumed as a notional point, a 
non-empirical gaze” (32). The author then projects these two tendencies onto the 
history of confrontation between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles,” elaborating 
them anew by expertly using abundant material from Russian literary and artistic 
heritage.

One problem of the book is that the teleological narrative of the struggle of oppo-
sites cannot help but bring the author to the inevitable pessimistic conclusion of “the 
end of art,” presenting him as an adherent of the descriptive, “disembodied,” “apo-
litical” model. While the book deserves praise for an original and insightful sum-
mary of major theoretical trends in art history, it short-circuits on account of what 
the Russian revolutionary thinker Nikolai Chernyshevskii formulated as the eternal 
question plaguing the Russian psyche: “What is to be done”? After reading about 
multiple transformations of visuality that unfolded in various historical periods, 
we have a rather clear picture of the development of artistic practice and art history 
thought up to the present time, but have no idea of what to do next to avoid what the 
author describes as the inevitable artlessness of our existence. Remarkably, while 
the first four chapters covering the material of the nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries are dedicated to Russian art, the last, most pessimistic, “end of art” chapter 
is devoid of concrete examples of contemporary Russian art, as if it does not exist or 
is not worth talking about.

According to the publisher’s note, the book is the continuation of the author’s 
archeological study of visuality launched in his previously published volume, 
Nezapnyi Mrak (which can be translated roughly as Nexpected Darkness, the first 
word being a neologism), published in 2007.

Natasha Kurchanova