An assumption common to many modern political theorists is that the nation-state is the natural goal of national movements. But for the submerged peoples of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the formulation of the goal of independent statehood required a leap in ideological development from essentially cultural and social to overtly political nationalism. In this article, I am interested in the ideological leap taken by the Ukrainians, particularly in the role played by the young intelligentsia in the formulation of the goal of a nation-state. My argument has three stages: a narrative account of events, designed to correct misconceptions in the existing historiography and to show that the goal of independence was put forward in the context of a generational conflict within the radical intelligentsia; an examination of the opposing ideas advanced by young and old radicals; and an explanation of why the young radicals could formulate the demand for Ukrainian statehood while their senior contemporaries could not.

Russian peasant farming techniques in the last decades of the nineteenth century are generally considered to have been technologically backward. What student of Russian history has not read about the dire effects of the three field system of agriculture, the lack of fertilizer, and the inadequate wooden plow used predominantly by Russian peasants? The low productivity of the peasant is traditionally attributed to these backward methods, which in turn are seen as contributors to the exhaustion of the land and consequently the impoverishment of the Russian peasantry. As the land became exhausted, peasants could not maintain their standard of living or meet an increasing tax burden. Technological backwardness and soil exhaustion are thus important indexes for the “crisis hypothesis,” which states that the economic well-being of the Russian peasantry was deteriorating as the nineteenth century came to a close. An investigation into the causes of the crop failure of 1891 and the quality of the Russian harvest after the crop failure and famine of 1891-92, however, clearly suggests that: (1) soil moisture was the critical determinant of harvest quality; (2) peasant methods were riot unambiguously “backward,” given the climate and soil conditions in much of the black earth district and the grainlands in general, and may even have been appropriate; and (3) Russian farmland was not becoming exhausted, particularly in the so-called hunger provinces of the central black earth district. Quite simply, the vicissitudes of weather determined the harvest in tsarist Russia.

Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714-80) was the first major Lithuanian poet and an outstanding figure in Lithuanian letters for all time. Born in a small village in East Prussia (Lithuania Minor), he spent most of his life as the Lutheran pastor of another such place, a parish called Tolminkiemis. Accounts of his life testify that he preached eloquently to his parishioners in both German and Lithuanian, made musical instruments — a clavichord and a piano — and played them, fought with the neighboring estate over parish lands, and corresponded with fellow ministers on various friendly matters, including the writing of Lithuanian poetry. When Donelaitis died, his literary legacy consisted of several fables and the rural epic Metai (The Seasons), written probably between 1765 and 1775, but not published until 1818. Metai stands as a milestone of Lithuanian literature. It was the first extensive poetic text (2,969 lines of hexameters) in that language and a work of intrinsic quality and lasting influence. Donelaitis' achievement has been increasingly recognized in recent decades, not only in Lithuania but abroad. His stature appears all the more remarkable against the background of pioneering efforts to establish Lithuanian as a literary language by members of the Protestant clergy in Lithuania Minor and by some western Lithuanian country gentry during the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The sudden emergence of his epic talent, seemingly without adequate support from the cultural milieu of his own or any previous time in Lithuanian tradition, has produced an aura of mystery around Donelaitis, attracting poets, scholars, and hero worshipers alike.

In recent years the history of early printing in Western Europe has received renewed attention from scholars with an interest not only in elucidating the internal evolution of printing, but also in demonstrating the relevance of this development for history in general. Indeed, some historians of printing now argue that the advent of movable type was a major landmark of the centuries between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. This proposition has given rise to the still bolder hypothesis that a “printing” or “typographical” revolution visibly altered European culture in the post-Gutenberg era.

While Western scholarship has directed considerable attention to printing in early modern Europe, the history of communications outside the West has gone relatively unnoticed. The failure to consider even those societies that stood on the periphery of European experience — Russia, Byzantium, the Balkans — is especially surprising since in many ways these societies were part of European culture. In the case of Russia, at least, the neglect of theoretical issues does not stem from a lack of published information, since the study of the Russian book has a long and rich past among Russian and Soviet bibliographers and literary historians.

A single witty remark delivered by Roman Jakobson at the expense of Maiakovskii's last, civic-minded poems may still be cited as a measure of prevailing Western attitudes toward the postrevolutionary bard of Russian Bolshevism: “Very good, but not as good as Mayakovsky.” Certainly, many Western appreciators of Russia's most Soviet, major poet have tuned out large portions of Maiakovskii's music. In that long oscillation between lyric and civic impulses that characterized Maiakovskii's poetic career, Western monitors have shown remarkably little interest in or patience with the extensive stretches of public poetry and narrative verse. This bias of the Western ear has not gone unnoticed. One Soviet commentator has responded with a witticism of his own: “It's a hopeless business — this attempt to tear apart his lyrics into two portions, into what is 'soul' and what is 'Soviet.'” Still, selective listening is not the monopoly of Western criticism alone. Soviet scholarship on Maiakovskii is as embarrassed by the irrepressible singer of a larger-than-life self as Western exegesis is by the propagandist who so proudly declaims Soviet hero-songs. Given Maiakovskii's extravagant temperament and his odd combinations of poetical and political revolutionism, it is probably inevitable that different portions of his work will be discriminated against by different readers for being “not as good as Mayakovsky.” But literary criticism has the task of overcoming tone-deafness to both the political resonances of his lyric verse and the poetic reverberations of his most partisan songs.

Tolstoi made the accurate and poetic description of death a literary problem to be solved: how does a writer use the resources of language to describe the actual sensation of dying, an experience which the living can never fully comprehend? Experimenting with various linguistic means to create and use ambiguity, Tolstoi worked on a solution to this problem over many years in Childhood, Sevastopol Tales, “Three Deaths,” War and Peace, “Notes of a Madman,” and The Death of Ivan ll'ich. There are critics who feel that his achievement in this area is virtually unsurpassed; a recent book on death in world literature devotes more attention and praise to Tolstoi than to any other writer.

The most powerful of all death scenes in Tolstoi's fiction is the one that portrays Prince Andrei Bolkonskii in War and Peace. The specter of death that Andrei sees in a dream, a substantiation of his fear of dying, is designated simply by the neuter pronoun ono (it). Konstantin Leont'ev was struck by this ono which he felt was so terrifying and mysterious that it could be identified with death itself. What makes ono so immediately striking is that although it is a neuter form, it is used intentionally (by being underlined) to refer directly to the word smert' (death), which is a feminine noun.

The range of topics that Vladimir Odoevski treated in his fiction and journalistic pieces is impressive. His interests embraced what we today think of as the more or less discrete categories of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities. His acquaintances referred to him as “the Russian Faust.“ Included in his oeuvre is a substantial body of music criticism, and indeed, he may rightly be considered Russia's first music critic. Odoevskii's opera criticism, an admittedly narrow topic, is the subject of this article.

There is good reason for concentrating on Odoevskii's writings about opera. For the operaphile there is the vicarious pleasure (and occasional mortification) of sharing a musically literate listener's reactions to then contemporary or nearly contemporary masterpieces by Mozart, Gluck, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Wagner, and others. On a less visceral level, an acquaintance with Odoevskii's opera criticism enhances our overall appreciation of the broad patterns underlying Odoevskii's complete literary output as well as Russian cultural history in the nineteenth century.

No culture enjoys a perfect integration or a static equilibrium of its component traits. The diffusion of features of culture is a constant and crucial dynamic process. Acculturation, as a process of change dominated by the mutual influence of different cultures in close contact, is especially suited to interdisciplinary scrutiny. The study of acculturation is equally challenging for the linguist, the ethnographer, the anthropologist, and the historian interested in investigating processes and forms of cultural change, cultural integration, and causes for the selective receptivity of cultures.

The multinational character of Soviet society against the background of its socioeconomic and ideological homogeneity renders a special quality to the dynamic tension between unity and diversity, especially with regard to culture, cultural change, and integration. Consequently, an investigation of acculturation as a component of the broader ethnic processes is not only justified, but imperative.