This book may be regarded as the culmination of a dialectical trilogy by Jeffrey Brooks. In his prize-winning When Russia Learned to Read (1985), Brooks told the story of Russia's vibrant post-emancipation popular literature. In Thank You, Comrade Stalin! (2000) he explained what happened to the most pervasive part of print culture—mass-circulation newspapers—after 1917. Now, in The Firebird and the Fox, he pulls together the pre-revolutionary and Lenin-Stalin periods in a single treatment of modern Russian culture. This latest book is, moreover, a synthesis in more than just chronological terms. In his earlier works, Brooks inevitably presented the Soviet era as something of a fall from grace after the cultural energy and creative commercialism of the 1861–1914 period. Now he looks for threads of continuity and commonality across a whole century from the folktales of the 1850s through to the late Sergei Prokof΄ev and Andrei Platonov. Rather than presenting a straightforward opposition between pre-revolutionary dynamism and Bolshevik constraint, he finds the key to modern Russian culture in the interplay between elite and popular culture and an associated quest for a national (not just imperial) identity. Always in the background is the classic Russian question of the civic role of art and the artist.

Brooks divides his century into three sections. In Part I, running from mid-century to around 1890, he describes the “emancipation of the arts” after writers and artists discovered new audiences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here Brooks introduces and explores what is perhaps the book's main recurring theme: the desire for freedom and agency, which may be pursued in redemptive or transgressive fashion. The theme has its leitmotifs and even its folkloric dramatis personae: Ivan the Fool, the bandit, the firebird, and the fox. The terms of the discussion were to a significant extent set by the authors and illustrators of popular prints (lubki) and instalment fiction. Brooks is attentive to the modulations of popular narratives as they were adapted and reinterpreted, entered new media and reached new audiences. One important example is Petr Ershov's influential The Little Hunchbacked Horse (written in the 1830s, but only permitted publication twenty years later), whose protagonist Ivan the Fool bests the tsar with the assistance of the eponymous magical horse. Brooks's study of the multiple illustrated editions and lubki that ensued over the following decades reveals a consistent trend for Ivan to be depicted in more dignified and heroic fashion. But Russia's great writers were also leading participants in this exploration of individual agency: Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii abandoned the “superfluous man” and presented the Russian imagination with compelling protagonists endowed with the freedom to act—even if this freedom sometimes led them to Siberia. In Part I, Brooks exemplifies to great effect his main argument: that modern Russian culture was an “ecosystem” in which high and low culture enjoyed an organic and highly fruitful relationship. Anton Chekhov, for example, was the quintessential cultural sponge, reading voraciously in every available genre. His calling card—the in medias res short story—may be regarded as his homage to the instalment novel. Another common feature of canonical and popular culture alike in this period is the sympathetic and respectful attention it pays to non-elite protagonists: just as Ivan the Fool gained in stature over the post-emancipation decades, so Chekhov and Tolstoi brought to the public strong and remarkable individuals from all walks of life in Sakhalin Island and Resurrection, respectively. Here was a new, more active and inclusive kind of national identity in the making.

Part II is concerned with the 25-year interlude “after realism”: from fin de siècle to revolution. Here Brooks shows the cultural elite turning away from the aesthetic that had won literature and art so many adherents over the previous half-century and affecting disdain of commercialism and the mass public. That did not mean, however, that the productive relationship between elite and popular culture came to an end. Decadent and Symbolist artists, for example, were preoccupied with demons, ghouls, and other sinister creatures from the Russian folk imagination. They had the opportunity to project their obsessions far beyond their own coterie in the boom of illustrated satire following the 1905 revolution: in their depictions of the tsarist regime and its representatives they produced nothing less than a “cornucopia of the macabre” (110). Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, the most successful “elite” cultural enterprise of the early twentieth century, derived much of its energy from reimagining the Russian popular tradition. Igor Stravinsky's firebird owed a lot to its antecedents but was still like no other, possessing new agency and artistic power. Even when decadents and futurists thumbed their noses at the mass public, they did so in a knowing and playful way, and at least part of the time in a very modern quest for celebrity.

In Part III, Brooks presents the least intuitive part of his story, arguing that the creative interplay between elite and popular continued even in the darkest moments of the Soviet period. To be sure, his accounts of canonical writers such as Isaak Babel΄ and Mikhail Bulgakov have little surprising to tell us. But he argues that Soviet culture acquires a hidden dynamism from its proclivity to irony. Drawing on his earlier study of reading practices, he makes the interesting suggestion that a society new to mass literacy and prone to reading aloud and debating what it heard was exceptionally attuned to ironic modes of reception. More fundamentally, Russia's folkloric archetypes are themselves highly ambivalent and amenable to multiple interpretation and reinterpretation. Folkloric figures—especially animals—remained prominent in Russian culture after the revolution if one knew where to look. Brooks's main post-1917 examples come from children's literature, which allowed writers such as Kornei Chukovskii and Platonov to continue to work the seam of freedom and agency even at the most terrifying moment of Russian history. In one striking example, Brooks mentions the case of Lev Kamenev's brother, the artist and illustrator Nikolai Rozenfel΄d, who in 1934 produced an edition of Ershov's The Little Hunchbacked Horse in which the protagonist Ivan is perhaps especially mocking of the tsar's authority. In the title of a poignant final chapter, Brooks declares that “Goodness Endures”—in the sense that goodness for its own sake, usually embodied by a Foolish protagonist, remains a prominent value in Russian children's literature even in the Stalin period.

The title of this book invites comparison with another big interpretive work on Russian culture: James Billington's The Icon and the Axe. Brooks's The Firebird and the Fox is a more modest work, and none the worse for that. For one thing, it covers one century rather than many. For another, it does not present a binary pair as a key to understanding Russian culture: the firebird and the fox are not exactly opposites, but rather complementary and ambivalent figures that are subject to constant reinvention and reimagining. Brooks's subject is the process of reimagining, which he shows as a never-ending dialogue between high and low culture. This is also a dialogue between different art forms. Perhaps the book's most rewarding feature is that it examines print culture in the round: not just the words on the page, but the images that accompanied those words. Illustrators such as Aleksei Afanas΄ev, Ivan Bilibin, and Nikolai Radlov deserve equal billing with the writers. The relationship between text and image (and music, which Brooks also discusses in places) may well prove to be another distinctive feature of the modern Russian cultural experience. To follow the logic of Brooks's earlier work, this might be seen as a consequence of Russia's late and accelerated acquisition of literacy; at any rate, it reflects the fact that the boundaries between high and low, and between different modes of cultural activity, were unusually permeable. Moreover, a text that is incomplete without its accompanying image or music lends itself to the irony that Brooks identifies as another hallmark of modern Russian culture.