In “Baryshnia-krestianka” Aleksandr Pushkin introduces us to Grigorii Ivanovich Muromskii, a “nastoiashchii russkii barin” reduced to living on his one remaining estate, who squanders his remaining wealth creating an “Angliiskii sad.” The gardening revolution of eighteenth century England, inspired by the overgrown ruins of Rome and Naples and by a new feeling for untrammeled nature, set in motion a vogue for informal, picturesque landscaping that swept across Europe, altered garden design in the United States, and reached Russia in the reign of Catherine as the harbinger of a later, more pervasive aristocratic Anglomania. As Muromskii's landscaping proclivities suggest, by the early nineteenth century the English or “irregular” garden had become a universal form for the Russian country estate, its basic motifs carried out on whatever scale an estate owner could afford.

At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks appeared to enjoy considerable social support. They were perceived as the proponents of soviet power; support for the Bolshevik party meant support for soviet power. The majority of workers (especially those in large industrial centers) identified with the Bolsheviks because they promoted greater workers’ control at the workplace. The Bolsheviks were perceived as uncompromising defenders of workers’ interests. For the peasants, the Bolsheviks represented a party of black repartition, that is a party that encouraged peasant land seizures. For the soldiers, the Bolsheviks were a party that promised to stop the war. For the Kronstadt sailors, the Bolsheviks exemplified direct rule from below, the rule of Soviets. All of these diverse constituencies converged in their support for the Bolshevik party at the end of 1917, each for a different reason.

Anna Akhmatova's Rekviem is a deceptively simple piece. Compared to the opacity and self-conscious literariness of Poema bez geroia, Rekviem seems transparent, much like Akhmatova's early lyrics, and appears to demand little in the way of commentary or elucidation.1 Its very form and scope, however, as well as the dates of its composition (1935-1961), identify it as a product of the "later Akhmatova"–the Akhmatova who resumed writing in the mid-1930s after a decade of relative poetic inactivity, the Akhmatova who created Poema bez geroia.

Recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction not only point in the creator's direction and thus to the realm beyond specific fiction, but they sometimes serve to set and mark local temporal and spatial conditions within the created universe. Invitation to a Beheading is probably the most convincing case in point. The novel's dimensions are defined almost exclusively through a thematic network, and even much of its plot is propelled by periodic devices, of which many are interlinked, and perhaps all are retroactive, if only because each serial occurrence must refer to its antecedent in order to keep the thematic circuit closed.

Until recently, the Soviet military establishment has tended to sanctify the essential elements of what it perceived to be the reasons for its success in the Great Fatherland War. Well beyond the familiar inclination of military organizations to plan for the last war, Soviet military leadership quite consciously and rather extensively has employed the past as a model to be used for the solution of contemporary problems. That the past has become so deeply imbedded in the Soviet military is perhaps not surprising, for as a careful, western observer once noted, “No crisis born of failure has arisen that would impel a reexamination of how things ought to be done.” Today, such a crisis clearly exists. Failure in Afghanistan and collapse of the national economy, combined with the emergence of significant new weapons technologies, have unquestionably been central factors. Moreover, evidence strongly points to the fact that the Soviet authorities themselves increasingly understand the situation in crisis terms and that a genuine reexamination of Soviet military thinking has been in progress for some time, certainly since before 1985.

Boris Eikhenbaum spent nearly a decade working within Opoiaz, the Petersburg branch of Russian formalism, to develop a work-centered poetics. Faced with the inadequacy of traditional mimetic, expressive, and pragmatic views of literature, he and his colleagues tried to address literary works without recourse to extraliterary facts. Any intrinsic poetics, however, encounters difficulties, for it must avoid even the most obvious cultural and historical explanations of any work taken as literary. In its struggle against crudely reductive interpretations of literature, Opoiaz had constantly to guard against sliding back into an external approach. This article will suggest that it was largely Eikhenbaum who played the role of guard dog, nudging the evolving Opoiaz view of literature back toward the literary work itself. How successful he was in this effort (and by extension, perhaps, the successes and shortcomings of workcentered literary theories in general) is the question to be examined here. Eikhenbaum's own shift, beginning in 1927, toward a study of literature that privileges the author, may tell us as much about the limitations of objective theories of literature as about the political inadmissibility of Russian formalism under Stalin.

One remarkable feature of the 1905 Russian Revolution was the efflorescence of labor organizations that occurred throughout the urban regions of the empire. Many workers throughout the empire demonstrated their resolve to promote and defend their interests in an organized and rational manner, with the mass labor movement often cutting across craft and occupational divisions to bring all kinds of workers into joint economic and political action against both employer and autocracy. As 1905 progressed the political radicalization of urban workers inspired much of the opposition movement that nearly brought the government to its knees. As several United States historians have recently shown, in 1905 organized labor, particularly trade unions, entered the political arena as a potent force, with workers simultaneously demanding individual rights of citizenship and collective rights of association.