Thinking back on my life in the precincts of the North American academy, I am struck by the variety it offered within a constant and recognizable ambience that I think of as distinctly American. I have lived and worked in the United States for half a century and feel grateful for both the unforeseen paths it opened for me and the stability it provided.

As thousands of original thinkers have repeated, life is always a puzzling mixture of choices and chances. Other thousands, with equal originality, have said that all the choices are really determined—they're not really choices at all. In this view, choice and chance get collapsed—usually to a combination of determining genes and determining culture; only half-educated extremists ever claim that it is only one or the other.

Eduardo Mendoza's City of Marvels recuperates the historical novel while subjecting it to the conventions of romance. These generic strategies relate to the manifest self-made man's rise to economic might between the two Barcelona World's Fairs and Barcelona's development as a modern metropolis—and to a later celebration: the 1992 Olympic Games. The depiction of the adventures of capital and the production of marvels responds to the bourgeoisie's role in Spain's modernization and to money's mediating function as a symbol of desire. The accomplishment of marvels involves the conquest of time and the substitution of illusory timelessness for historical contingencies. Timelessness mediated by money negates history through the production of ersatz historical images, which reinscribe an idealized past as the object of desire. A restoration—the figurative replication of historical events—is the response to nostalgia for a missed historical opportunity by a subject seeking myth's illusory power.

“El celoso extremeño” is one of the most widely read tales in Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares. The story—a variation on the tale of the old man with a young bride—has been analyzed in the contexts of the Hispano-Arabic tradition (e.g., Américo Castro) and of the European humanist tradition (e.g., Alban Forcione). This essay attempts to develop a reading that identifies, and comes to terms with, the novella's numerous allusions to the Americas. Three neglected circumstances motivated this reading: “El celoso extremeño” takes place in Seville (the city that enjoyed an official monopoly on traffic between Spain and the New World in Cervantes's time), centers on the government of an isolated community of racially diverse women, and begins and ends with a character's departure for the Indies. The essay speculates that Spain's early colonial experience may have influenced and informed the debates concerning domestic social relations on the peninsula.

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

In approaching the enigmatic representation of Germann's fantastic visions and experiences in “The Queen of Spades,” Dostoevsky argues that the perfection of the story lies in Pushkin's ability to make mutually exclusive ideas equally convincing. However, Germann's madness, one of the story's central events, has been treated almost uniformly as a sort of punishment visited on the hero by the author. To be sure, Pushkin often resorts to parody to bring out the reductive and vulgar aspects of his hero's imagination and madness—a literary practice of the times. Nevertheless, Pushkin also subtly provides evidence for an antithetical but equally valid romantic interpretation of Germann's madness and life. When Germann chooses the queen at the end, he takes the right card: for the first time in his life, he chooses to risk, to gamble—that is, to live. Germann's choice—and the madness that leads to and results from it—echoes in Russian literature from Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov to Nabokov's own Hermann/GepMaH, in Despair.

In the summer of 1961, three brilliant young scholars at the Institute of World Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow set out by train to see Bakhtin for the first time, in the far-off provincial town of Saransk, where he taught Russian and foreign literatures at the University of Mordovia (until declining health forced him to retire in August 1961). The three devoted admirers were Sergey Georgyevich Bocharov (the author of the following article), Georgy Dmitryevich Gachev, and Vadim Valeryanovich Kozhinov (the enterprising and resourceful leader of the group).