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A Devil's Vaudeville: The Demonic in Dostoevsky's Major Fiction

in minute detail, and it is instructive to see it treated within the broader context of other important European commissions of the eighteenth century. In a close reading of the monument as visual form (chapter 8), Schenker distills two centuries of divergent interpretations into an analysis that would make excellent reading for students grappling with the way images communicate ideas. He shows how, with elements like the raised right hand (threatening or benign?) and the horse's gait (leaping or pulled up short?), Falconet created an image whose ambiguous and multivalent meanings made it a perfect metaphor for the history of post-Petrine Russia and the troubled relationship between ruler and ruled. Schenker, a philologist, is keenly aware of the challenges involved in explaining the enduring appeal of great works of art, using Falconet's debate with Denis Diderot on the interchange of word and image as a touchstone for the entire book. Among the book's important contributions is the central role accorded Marie-Anne Collot, to whom authorship of the horseman's head has traditionally been attributed. Schenker has quite rightly given her a central role as Falconet's lifelong companion and, he argues, lover; and he stresses that she was a gifted portrait sculptor esteemed by her contemporaries. It therefore comes as a shock to read the brief section in which Collot's actual contribution to the monument is discussed. On rather flimsy speculative grounds Schenker rejects Falconet's own claim that Collot was the sole author of the horseman's head, favoring instead the view of "modern doubters" like David Arkin that "Collot provided Falconet with a portrait of the tsar, but that he then altered it to suit his vision" (286). Despite Schenker's obvious sympathy for Collot the woman and helpmate, as an artist she emerges curiously diminished by this equivocal stand and her claim to be one of its makers suddenly seems tenuous. This definitive work on Falconet and his monument will be invaluable to anyone working in the field of eighteenth-century studies. But it is also, quite consciously, a product of modern history. Published in 2003 to coincide with the tercentenary of the founding of St. Petersburg, it is itself one more link in the long chain of commentaries on "the St. Petersburg theme" dating back to AJeksandr Pushkin's Bronze Horseman.