Even a brief survey of the institutional history of Russia and the Soviet Union will show the existence of a remarkable number of institutions and officials whose main function is best described as supervisory. They do not usually legislate or make policy decisions. For the most part they do not execute policy directly or pass legal judgments. Their task is to check that other government officials and institutions are acting in conformity to the law and the commands of their superiors. Yet for all their evident importance during two and a half centuries (and in spite of the fact that Russian statesmen were always aware of their importance), the general nature and significance of these institutions have not been fully clarified. Of the several important works on individual supervisory institutions, none that I know of attempts to explain the role played in Russian institutional history by supervisory institutions as a whole.

In recent decades, historians of prerevolutionary Russia have emphasized the diverse and complex nature of the group of educated Russians that has traditionally been referred to as the “intelligentsia.” In the existing historiography, there have been numerous investigations into various subgroups of the intelligentsia, including studies of noble intellectuals, students, women radicals, religious thinkers, ethnic elites, and members of political parties and of specific professions. The subgroup that contributed more to Russian professions and political movements than any other non-noble subgroup in both quantitative and qualitative terms is also the only prominent subgroup that has been neglected. The members of this neglected subgroup are Russian Orthodox clergymen's sons, referred to throughout this article by the Russian term popovichi?

Among the scores of unpublished manuscripts in fond 89 (“Bolotovykh”) of the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg is a partially filled album spanning a forty-year period from the early 1780s to the early 1820s. One of the many long-term projects of the multitalented memoirist, landscape designer, and agronomist Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov (1738-1833), the album was initiated at Bogoroditsk, the crown estate where he worked as bailiff from 1776-1797, and continued to garner new contributions for several decades after he retired to Dvorianinovo, his estate and birthplace in northern Tula province. It has been summarized by one of the few scholars who has studied it as “an extremely interesting mirror of provincial byt.” The pretty and seemingly mimetic reflection of rural life that it provides is deceptive on a number of levels, however: for on the Russian estate during this period— and, as it turns Out, on the pages of the album itself—there is a good deal more going on than first meets the eye.

The structure of Doktor Zhivago is in many respects unique. Its concluding chapter is a collection of poems ostensibly composed by the novel’s central figure. The preceding sixteen prose chapters are themselves further divided into numerous individual scenes, focused on a predominant image, that may be likened to separate cinematic shots. In this respect, the novel lends itself to discussion of the relations between narrative and cinematic technique. It also seeks a certain reconciliation between specific incidents documented in prose and then later reformulated as poetry, affording a sense of “dialogue” between the two classic modes of expression. The purpose of this essay, however, will be to consider dialogue primarily in its concrete sense, rather than range across an entire figurative spectrum, to which the term or its derivatives seem, in recent usage, naturally to gravitate. Metaphoric interpretation, nevertheless, will also find its place here in response to the poetic qualities of the work itself. In broad outline, the intent of this study will be to concentrate upon a specific complex aspect of the novel, its dialogic structures, and attempt to demonstrate that, within this singular work, they are worthy of attention as principal features accounting for its singularity.

In the last decade, the international copyright environment has been transformed by the rise of digital technology and by a new emphasis on intellectual property as a key to global economic growth. Recent trends have coincided with developments in the postcommunist nations of central and eastern Europe and Eurasia and have changed the rules for the use and dissemination of works originating in these nations. In this article, Janice T. Pilch examines recent developments in a historical context, from the origins of the international copyright system in the mid-nineteenth century and the establishment of U.S. copyright relations with central and east European nations in the early twentieth century, to integration within the international copyright regime today. The chronology details the application of U.S. copyright law to works from these nations, illustrating the effects of copyright restoration in the mid-1990s to foreign works that had previously been in the public domain in the United States, a development of foremost concern to scholars, educators, and librarians whose efforts depend on the continued availability of information.

The Russian ancien régime presents a paradox. Like other anciens régimes, it exhibited many signs of decay. The government had been unsuccessful in its major military enterprises ever since the Crimean War, its diplomatic defeats ranging from the Congress of Berlin to the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1909. Failure abroad was accompanied by signs of weakness within. The crisis of 1879-82 had shown the strength of internal opposition. In 1905, ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan proved to be the prelude to a revolution that shook tsarism to its foundations and clearly displayed its structural weaknesses. The last two “Autocrats of All Russia” were men of mediocre talent. The tsarist court, especially under Nicholas II, was ridden with scandals typical of a declining, unsure, and, indeed, frightened regime. Meanwhile, Russia’s ruling class, the hereditary landed nobility, improvident and debt-ridden, its landholdings reduced from 73.1 million desiatins in 1877 to a mere 43.2 million by 1911, was in headlong decline.

Barrels roll. In a mythological, folk, or literary text, they set off a reciprocal dynamic of emptying out and filling in. Where Diogenes filled his barrel with his own cynical self, Francois Rabelais removed him, then poured back in the wine drained off to accommodate his asceticism. On the basis of this example, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates the need to re-embody the disembodied; in connection with the folk laughter that replenishes the hollow chill of mortality, he notes that Rabelais celebrated the “cheerful death” of the Duke of Clarence in a barrel full of malmsey. In Vladimir Propp’s analysis of myth, folktales, and initiation rites, barrels stand in for the bellies of great fish; these swallow and then regurgitate the hero, supplying in the interim “temporary death,” mystic instruction, and the makings of a leader or a savior of the people. It is in an ocean-going barrel that Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon, condemned to an infant death, grows “not by days, but by hours” (“Skazka o tsare Saltane” [Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831]), repeating the pattern of reversals in birth dreams, through exposure on the water and entombment in womb-like receptacles, studied by Otto Rank. Il'ia Erenburg’s apostle of absolute and universal negation had planned to start his mission by crossing the Atlantic in a beer barrel (Julio Jurenito, 1922). The dual or schizophrenic narrator of Sasha Sokolov’s Shkola dlia durakov (School for fools, 1976), though otherwise anonymous, is moved to fill his mentor’s barrel with his own singular name.