The substantive portion of this paper is intended to be incorporated later into a comprehensive study of time horizon in economic history. Hence an elucidation of the concept and of its main aspects should precede the presentation and interpretation of the relevant material that has been drawn from a scrutiny of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, that is to say, from novels and plays. In this connection, it will have to be explained why belleslettres can and should be regarded as one of the sources of insights into the problems involved.

In 1896 Hungarians celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of their conquest of the Central European Plains. Intoxicated with the heady wine of nationalism, they seemed almost to believe that their millennium prefigured the thousand-year reign of Christ prophesied in the book of Revelation. Public officials loudly proclaimed Hungary to be the best of all possible worlds and extolled the virtues of patriotism in the most extravagant terms. Publicists eulogized the Hungarian national genius and lamented that all of Eastern Europe was not ruled by Magyars. The most enthusiastic patriots confidently predicted yet another thousand years of national glory.

In this article, Carolyn Forestiere investigates political volatility as a way to explain varying levels of governance across the new democracies of east central Europe. Specifically, legislative and executive volatility are examined. The results suggest that differences in legislative volatility help explain variations in governance, especially during the beginning of a new democracy. Once party systems begin to consolidate, however, differences in executive volatility begin to matter more. A case study of Poland confirms some of Forestiere's conclusions. While the legislative party system has shown some signs of stabilization, executive volatility remains a salient political problem, which over time has led to a steady decline in the quality of governance.

Ivan Karamazov articulates the philosophical problem of the limits of religion in his “Rebellion.” In this article, Harriet Murav argues that, far from being an enemy of religion, Ivan gets to the heart of the problem of responding to the suffering of the other. Christ crucified is a scandalous temptation, according to St. Paul. Extending the logic of the skandalon to Ivan makes possible an alternative reading of his “Rebellion.” The suffering of the innocent child is Ivan's “stumbling block,”—the skandalon that prevents him from accepting the meaningfulness of human history. But reading Ivan's position as nothing more than an attack on religion gets us off the hook of the skandalon too easily. To remain hypnotized by the difficulty without taking responsibility would be equally disastrous. Ivan's “Rebellion” makes legible the simultaneous impossibility and possibility of faith. Vasilii Rozanov, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida provide the framework in which to read the “Rebellion.”

In his article on Western studies of Soviet power, purpose, and policy—which I shall call Sovietology—Alexander Dallin has brought us to a timely reconsideration of the needs and prospects of our area field. Part of the problem is whether the “remarkable catalogue of hypotheses later abandoned or disproved” really indicates that specialists in Sovietology have been relatively ineffective. Still more important are the real reasons for our failures—and surely they are numerous.

In the 1880s and 1890s, Vladimir Solov'ev worked out a Christian approach to nations and nationality, and a moral critique of nationalism, while waging a polemical battle against the Russian conservative nationalists of his day. His ideas emerged primarily from his own social gospel theology, but they were marked by both the Slavophile romanticism of his early career and the western liberalism of his later years. Solov'ev is most often treated as a philosopher, a mystic, or a literary figure, and as a result, his journalistic writings on nationalism and other topics have often been overlooked by scholars, even though they constitute at least a third of his published output.

For well over a century scholars with a variety of concerns have inquired into the level of literacy in pre-Petrine Russia with mixed success at best. The problem is well known: The array of sources upon which historians of other cultures typically rely to estimate levels of literacy–parish records, wills, service records, and tax lists–either do not exist for pre–Petrine Russia or do not provide the volume of data necessary for computing literacy in a statistically meaningful way.

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.

Can Fiction be considered a serious source of information on modern economic history? In a recent article on English novels in the 1840s, William O. Aydelotte points out that information of such nature as contained in the works of the four most important social novelists of that decade (Dickens, Kingsley, Disraeli, and Mrs. Gaskell) “is highly suspect for the scholar's purpose” because “it is spotty, impressionistic, and inaccurate.“ This is a harsh verdict. Yet, in a somewhat milder form, it may well prove generally valid. The truth probably is that the economic historian of modern times does not need the aid of contemporaneous novels or plays. The social historian may indeed be greatly interested in inquiring as to why certain novels were written and why they were read. But this is a different matter.

The Recent Publication of Journey for Our Time; the Journals of the Marquis de Custine, has served the purpose of reawakening interest in the conflict between East and West which existed a century ago. In some respects, a comparison with the present “cold war” is in place. Thus Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, in the introduction, points to certain similarities in the status of the Tsarist Empire around 1839, as reported by de Custine, and the Russia of our times.

Separately considered, the journals of the Marquis de Custine perhaps give an impression of uniqueness which is not warranted. The French nobleman was not the first in his own generation to point to a supposed Russian threat. Nor was he an isolated prophet in a wilderness, calling for some sort of European unity or alliance against the Muscovite menace, personified in the glacial figure of the Russian autocrat, Nicholas I.

One of the mysteries of Joseph Brodsky's biography was that, even as Petersburg continued to haunt many of Brodsky's writings of exile, the poet himself did not return to his native city after being exiled in 1972. In this article, Andrew Reynolds explores the notion of the “Petersburg text” as it applies to Brodsky's work and reveals Brodsky's deep ambivalence toward the kenoticism central to many readings of the “Petersburg text” and the “Russian idea” itself. The article argues that Brodsky's “last” poem, “August,” is both an attempt to exorcise and, ultimately, an acceptance of the fatidic patterns which seem to make a “return to Petersburg” inevitable in art if not in life. The poem is both an elegy for a (still living?) tradition and a self-elegy, and represents Brodsky's final recognition that he is Aleksandr Pushkin's successor in more ways than one: the strongest Russian poets always die “in January,” irrespective of which month or season becomes one's “fate.“

In his Ispoved' (Confession), Tolstoy gives us a painful picture of a man who, in his search for a solution to the problems of human existence, experiences the same feelings as a man lost in a dense wood:

He comes to an open plain, climbs up a tree, and sees around him endless space, but nowhere a house—he sees darkness, but again no house. Thus I lost my way in the wood of human knowledge, in the twilight of mathematical and experimental science, which opened before me a clear and distant horizon in the direction of which there could be no house, and in the darkness of philosophy, plunging me into a greater gloom with every step I took, until I was at last persuaded that there was, and could be, no way out. When I followed what seemed the bright light of learning, I saw that I had only turned aside from the real question.

During the middle ages, England and Hungary represented the two extreme ends of the Christian world, and the scholarly ties connecting the two countries were rather incidental for many centuries. At that time, the University of Paris was the furthest destination of Hungarian students and only a few of them crossed the Channel.

Humanists, however, enhanced the number and range of wandering scholars. They overcame many a geographical barrier and established connections between countries which heretofore had been isolated in the primitive conditions of medieval times.

In my view, the skeptical comments of Steven L. Hoch, whether intentionally or not, undeservedly discredit human height data as an indicator of the physiological status and well-being of populations, and possibly represent the historiographical appearance of a postmodern intellectual ideology, whose representatives look with distrust on historical sources. Hoch repeats some traditional objections connected with data on height: 1) terminal height—that is, the height a person attains by the age of 20 to 25–is not a true indicator of the physiological status and well-being of a population; 2) the precision of height data falls below the standard scientific requirements for reliable indicators; 3) periodization of the dynamics of physiological status of the population and of basic data on height is impossible in principle; 4) the reasons for changes in physiological status cannot be subjected to rigorous analysis.

This essay examines a variety of popular engagements with history made possible by new technologies, namely the Internet and video games. We term these nondisciplinary appropriations of history parahistorical. Parahistory is an international phenomenon, but it is articulated differently in various national contexts. Russian parahistorical pursuits provide insight into both the phenomenon at large and the peculiarities of the Russian state's and population's attitudes toward history and historical memory. On the basis of a contextualized survey of Russian parahistory, we argue that historians cannot afford to ignore these uses of history beyond the academy which can teach us a great deal about the nature and broader implications of our discipline.

The name of Solzhenitsyn so dominated the Soviet literary scene in the 1960s that the ordinary Western reader might be forgiven for supposing that in the writing of fiction he was the lone star in an otherwise featureless sky. This is far from being the case. Solzhenitsyn himself, in a recent interview with Western correspondents, pointed out that there are a number of other writers of major stature at work in Russia today, though understandably he was inhibited from naming any of them.1 In fact, in the return to the moral concern, insight, and compassion which are the great heritage of the nineteenth-century realist novel, Solzhenitsyn has been by no means alone. On the contrary, he is merely primus inter pares among a whole school of writers who have made it their aim to digest and reassess Russia’s apocalyptic recent past, and in the light of it to reflect on man’s moral nature.