Barabtarlo, Gennady (Ed.): Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia. New York, Oxford 2000

American universities often combine their German and Russian Departments--probably out of a misty notion that both cultures are situated somewhere in North-eastern Europe and use difficult languages. There are, of course, many more common features between Russian and German culture, but so far especially in the Angloamerican context little has been done to elucidate this interesting and versatile relation. Gennady Barabtarlo's reader with 18 contributions is one of the first attempts to present this problem to an American academic audience. A conceptual problem of this collection of articles lies, however, in its excessively broad range of topics: It covers over 200 years, from the Enlightenment to Soviet prison literature. It would have probably been more revealing to focus all the contributions thematically on one century or one specified aspect of the German-Russian cultural encounter.