In her book, Katherine Lahti navigates the visual, literary, and performing arts, as well as the early days of social science, to explain the appeal of a seemingly inconsequential poetic form for Russian modernists. As Lahti notes in her informative first chapter, since Aristotle's Poetics, the dithyramb, a product of rituals dedicated to Dionysus (the god of wine and rebirth), was thought to be the origin of tragedy. During the nineteenth-century revival of classical antiquity, archeologists, philologists, and comparative ethnographers continued to speculate about the origins of the cult of Dionysus. Her first chapter is especially useful because it demarcates the separate discoveries of the classicist Erwin Rohde, whose approach is primarily anthropological, and the far more influential conclusions of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose Birth of Tragedy is often assumed to be the source for all Silver Age interest in antiquity. Lahti writes with impressive command of this scholarly history, noting two essential features of the dithyramb that caught the Russians’ attention. First, many Russians accepted the theory that the cult of Dionysus spread to Greece from Thrace, whose northern locale was by some believed to be inhabited by ancient Slavic peoples (56). Secondly, probably through Rohde's work on religious ecstasy and concepts of immortality in the ancient worship of Dionysus, Lahti argues that Viacheslav Ivanov and his cohort were drawn to the dithyramb for its potential to enact a religious transformation of the self and collective. In Chapter 2, Lahti outlines how the Russian reception of the dithyramb is ostensibly oriented against Darwinist, progressivist theories of history. This fascination with antiquity, however, occasioned a faith in pseudo-scientific theories about literary, cultural, and “racial” evolution that the very same cursed “Age of Progress” had generated. It is lamentable that Lahti does not fully address occultism and theosophy, two schools barely mentioned in her study, which relied on science and comparative ethnography to advance many racist theories of history.

The remainder of Lahti's book examines cultural actors whom she considers essential to the history of the dithyramb. Chapter 3 is mostly dedicated to Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and includes a valuable overview of the 1902 staging of his translation of Euripides's Hippolytus. Chapter 4 surveys Ivanov's lifelong scholarly and artistic engagement with antiquity and Dionysus. Chapter 5 is dedicated to Fedor Sologub's poetry, mysteries, and theoretical writings on the theater. Chapter 6 looks at several poets, including Innokentii Annenskii, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, Valery Briusov, and Konstantin Bal΄mont. While it is impossible to survey every relevant text, the absence of Sergei Gorodetskii's Iar΄ (1907) in this chapter is curious. Chapter 7 turns to the Futurists, especially Velimir Khlebnikov, and offers still more evidence of the close ties of this group to the symbolist generation. Lahti dedicates Chapter 8 to Vladimir Maiakovskii and makes a compelling case for his knowledge of antiquity through a reading of his Vladimir Maiakovskii: A Tragedy. In Chapter 9, Lahti summarizes the Isadora Duncan phenomenon, painterly depictions of the khorovod (round dance) by Henri Matisse, as well as Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, evidence that for her proves the influence of the dithyramb in nonverbal art forms. Chapter 10 summarizes productions directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Nikolai Evreinov that have “strong dithyrambic elements” (245), but she lacks evidence to support her claim that his 1922 constructivist production of The Magnanimous Cuckold shows his “attempts to revive the dithyramb” (253). The concluding Chapter 11 offers an argument for how the dithyramb influenced mass spectacles in the years just after the October Revolution.

Although Lahti gives extensive background on the dithyramb in Chapters 1 and 2, her analysis of primary sources in subsequent chapters shows that a historical, largely descriptive survey is not enough to hold together such an ambitious thematic study. Her analysis of a variety of objects—poetry, theater, sculpture, and dance—does not lead to a larger interpretive conclusion about the dithyramb. At the very least, her historical survey would have been strengthened by a structuralist approach to the poetic text. There is no formal analysis of poetic form in any of the several chapters devoted to the dithyramb in poetry, even though Ivanov's stylizations were inspired by ancient meters, and the distinctive rhythms of Bal΄mont's verses provide rich material for interpretation. Scholars should approach Lahti's history of the dithyramb in Russia as a survey of the wider appeal of Greek antiquity during the Silver Age. While her study is most useful for scholars of pre-revolutionary modernisms in Russia, her accessible and unpretentious writing style—occasionally too informal for the conventions of formal academic writing—might reach other non-Slavic specialists, or even a popular audience.