Armstrong concentrates on Amyraut's effort to \"think Calvin's thoughts after him,\" to maintain the openness, the historical emphasis, the refusal to flatten out the contraditions of the faith by an overriding aprioristic rationalism. Many who still proudly own the name of Calvin may be displeased at Armstrong's basic thesis. Perhaps both the scholastic, deductive orthodox school represented by Du Moulin and the humanist, inductive school of Amyraut can claim the founder's name. But, if our author's theological portrait of Amyraut is correct, there is no question that the professor of Saumur has grasped the essential Calvin. It is no accident that in Institutio (1559) predestination is preceded by the long chapter on prayer with its extended commentary on the Lord's Prayer. In Calvin's teaching on prayer, and explicitly in every prayer he prayed, the conditional character of salvation, from man's side, is taught. The heart of Calvin's (and Amyraut's) teaching on the \"revealed\" will of God is to be seen in the second part of these invariably three-step prayers: the plea that man, despite his sinful alienation from God, may turn in repentance and through Christ's grace find eternal reconciliation with God. It is upon this \"universal\" call to repentance that Calvin and Amyraut would have us dwell, not upon the admitted fact that not all men will ultimately be saved. Herein is the distinction between the \"two wills\" of God, revealed and secret. God has one will, of course, but in accommodating his message to our limited capacity, this will is seen under these two humanly unresolved contrary aspects. To the orthodox Calvinists such a contradiction seemed an affront to reason. Armstrong's study is a full, careful, and engrossing one. It is to be commended not only to readers of theological interest, but to all persons interested in intellectual history, and especially to Christians of the Reformed tradition who are seeking to understand their intellectual and spiritual roots.

The New Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Henry Snyder Gehman. 1027 pp. Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1970. $10.95

Istoriia odnogo mifa: Ocherki russkoi literatury XIX-XX vv. By Savelii Dudakov. Moscow: Nauka, 1993. 282 pp. Appendixes. Index. Bibliography. Figure. English abstract. Hard bound.

Literature and History: Riddles in Space and Time

Alexander Blok's poem Retribution amounts to what may be called his spiritual testament Blok (1880-1921) worked on this poem for over eleven years, from 1910 to 1921 Almost up to his last day he was still trying to arrange the materials left in the draft or outline form the fragments written in June 1921 were the last verses that Blok ever wrote He was tormented by the sense of his poem's elusiveness, inexplicability, by its ineluctable incompleteness Whatever external reasons may have caused Retribution to remain unfinished, one of the main internal reasons lay with the organization of space The poem's plot covers a long period of Russian and world history, from the 1870s to the first decade of the twentieth century Blok pedantically collected historical details about the rule of Alexander III and about the 1877-1878 Russian-Turkish war As he conceptualized his poem, these events, along with other realia of the period, were supposed to provide an epic background for the destiny of three generations of one family: a father, a son, and the son's son In the Introduction, Blok describes the idea of Retribution as follows: "A family that has suffered the retribution of history, of the environment, of the epoch, begins, in its turn, to administer retribution; the last of the first-born is already able to snarl and roar like a lion; he is ready to seize, with his little human hand, the wheel of history And he may, indeed, have seized it Through catastrophes and setbacks my 'Rougon-Macquarts' free themselves gradually from the A©ducation sentimentale of Russian nobility, 'coal turns into a diamond,' and Russia into a New America, a New not the Old America" (Blok 1960-1965, III: 298) The idea of Retribution is, in effect, connected both with the WesternEuropean novel (Emile Zola's naturalistic chronicle) and with the notion

The Organization of Space in Alexander Blok's Retribution

The article presents the history of translation of Velimir Khlebnikov's poetry into Hebrew. Khlebnikov (1885\-\-1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism, was a trailblazer of new linguistic and philosophic vistas in poetry. His poems are singularly difficult and original in their highly involved idiom and construction, as well as the subject-matter which borrows from such diverse fields as history, mythology, mathematics, and biology. The translations of his poems into Hebrew, starting with those by Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlyonsky, and Eliyahu Tesler in the pioneering 1942 collection "Shirat Rusiia" ("The Poetry of Russia") and ending with Aminadav Dykman's in his magisterial anthology of Russian poetry "Dor Sheli \-\- Khaia Sheli: MiShirat Rusiia BaMea HaEsrim" ("My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century," 2002), are characterized by ingenuity in rendering Khlebnikov's "trans-sense" idiom while transposing his thoroughly Russian world-view into Hebrew realia. The article also discusses the Israeli reception of Khlebnikov as poet and philosopher, as reflected in Dan Avidan's poetry and Mikhail Grobman's paintings.

Nina Segal

Papers

The Organization of Space in Alexander Blok's Retribution

Velimir Khlebnikov in Hebrew