The question of Shakespeare's influence on Pushkin's work in the period beginning 1824-25 has often been examined in critical works on Pushkin. This influence has generally been construed as one of the decisive factors in Pushkin's poetic and personal maturation away from his early naive Byronism. At the same time, Pushkin found in Shakespeare a release from the outworn conventions of French classical drama that had until then provided the precepts for writers for the Russian stage. For Pushkin, two specific features of Shakespearean drama were congenial: the abandonment of the three classical unities in favor of the primacy of character in dramatic action, and generic mixtures of comedy and tragedy, poetry and prose.

In his work as both philosopher and poet, Vladimir Solov'ev is motivated by seemingly contradictory desires: to apprehend in the world a higher, mystical "total–unity" that lends coherence and meaning to our lives, and to assert the validity of otherness, of the varieties of individual experience in this world. Throughout Solov'ev struggles with the possibilities inherent in available intellectual discourses–scientific, poetic, philosophical, and religious–to arrive at that combination of conceptualization and sensory experience that he called "thinking" total-unity. His historical revaluation of erotic love, The Meaning of Love (Smysl liubvi, 1892-1894), is a pivotal work in this quest. In addition to its well–known arguments in defense of erotic love, this essay focuses on the problem of discourse and its role in articulating and conceptualizing the mystical or revealed knowledge that eludes sense and reason.

The Russian empire provided Islam a sheltered but precarious place within its borders. Sporadic efforts at forced conversion to Orthodoxy ended in 1773 with Catherine II's edict of religious tolerance, which officially acknowledged the existence of the Muslim community and allowed the free practice of its essential religious rites. Among these, pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) was one of the most sacred. But distrust of Islam and fear of Muslim revolt, fed by an almost paranoid apprehension of pan-Islamic solidarity, were deeply embedded in tsarist policies and attitudes toward pious Muslims.

Russia's peasants and their culture in postreform Russia have enjoyed the attention of an ever-increasing number of scholars over the past two decades. One central aspect of that culture, however, has remained virtually unexplored: Eastern Orthodox Christianity as it was practiced and understood by peasant believers, and especially by peasants who considered themselves members of the official Orthodox Church. At least two explanations may exist for such scholarly neglect. First, historians of Russia have traditionally viewed "official" Orthodoxy as somehow forcibly imposed on the people by secular and ecclesiastical authorities.

The complex interaction between religion and atheism in the former Soviet Union continues to attract scholarly interest. Recent studies of Russian Orthodox Church history during the early Soviet era have broken new ground, yet institutional and political concerns continue to dominate the discussion. Exceptions to this trend place religion in a broader social framework, thereby yielding new insights into religion as a cultural system that the Bolsheviks attacked.

The Russian revolution was intended to remove all limits to women's equality. Collective organizations were to take over the kinds of tasks–childcare, cooking, and cleaning–that had traditionally restricted women and limited their full participation in economic life, while legislative actions mandated equal economic, marital, and civil rights. Accompanying these changes was a "sexual revolution" (preached most famously by Aleksandra Kollontai) that encouraged equality in love and sex as well as in economics and politics.