Excursions: Essays on Russian and Serbian Literature.

Mihailovich, Vasa D.

The slender book of literary essays Excursions attests to the prodigious output of E. D. Goy, one of the leading Slavists and a scholar who has devoted a great deal of his work to Serbian and Croatian literatures. Excursions deals almost equally with Russian and Serbian literatures. Two articles are on Pushkin ("Pushkin's 'Little Tragedies'" and "Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman") and one on Turgenev ("The Epilogue in Turgenev's Novels"). Goy's essays are distinguished by their boldness and perspicacity, approaching the subject matter from new and intriguing angles.

In his essays on Serbian writers, Goy displays another quality that is typical of his scholarly approach: he is not reluctant to tread paths not often traveled. The essay "The Play Tasana by Borisav Stankovic" is a good example. Most critics prefer to deal with Stankovic's novels and short stories and with his play Kostana, whereas Goy chooses a play that has languished in the shadow of Kostana. Lamenting the fact that Tasana is seen by many as a failure, Goy proceeds to analyze the play in order to show that it represents a new development in Stankovic's art, giving a clear insight into all his earlier works. After tracing interesting similarities between Chekhov's dramas and Tasana, Goy also examines the play not as a mirror of Vranje of that time - as almost everyone who deals with Stankovic does - but as a symbol and an embodiment of existence. Such intriguing conclusions make Goy's essays worth reading, in addition to other reasons.

The other two essays - "Five Inverted Stories by Veljko Petrovic" and "Realisation and Idea in the Stories by Veljko Petrovic" - again concern a writer who had been somewhat eclipsed even before his death in 1962, most likely because he was only a short-story writer; it is a fate that has befallen many such writers. Analyzing the stories "Perica je nesrecan," "Zemlja," "Iskusenje," "Sarina Lenka," and "Cubura - Kalemegdan," Goy refuses to accept the traditional view of Petrovic as only a social-realist character writer and a portrayer of the Vojvodina. Again finding similarities with Chekhov and several Serbian writers, Goy notes in Petrovic's storytelling a propensity to take a familiar theme, invert it, and give it a new twist. The writer also displays a tendency to give his stories a psychological and even philosophical bent involving universal questions of existence. In this sense, Goy sees Petrovic's best stories as equal to those of the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, a statement which will surprise some but which remains valid nevertheless.

E. D. Goy's breadth of vision, knack for comparison, and courage of conviction make him one of the few foreign scholars who have examined Serbian literature with passion and, in the process, have produced new and refreshing insights.

Vasa D. Mihailovich University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill