Julia Kristeva, taking a psychoanalytic approach to the question of exile and exilic identity in Strangers to Ourselves and other works, makes a distinctive contribution to the field of exile studies. She constructs the Balkans as geopolitical analog to the psychoanalytic concept of “archaic mother,” the unconscious source of carnage and violence. She proposes “Oedipal revolt” as a kind of national psychotherapy to connect individual Balkan subjects with their unconscious desire for the maternal space— which will free them to be civilized by internalizing the law of the father. Kristeva even sees this Oedipal reconstruction as a necessary precondition to the establishment of “intimate democracy” in the Balkans. In identifying her “archaic mother” as the Balkan east, however, and in formulating her project of Oedipal revolt, she denigrates the Balkans (in particular, Bulgaria, her country of origin) and discursively elevates France—and “French taste“—to the top of her civilizational hierarchy.

The article examines the aversive emotion of disgust and its deployment in the visual arts and in the premier Russian modernist novel, Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, which has not been considered in regard to its affective poetics before. Based on recent studies of the emotions in cultural history and theory, it explores the philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of disgust as a response to something viscerally and/or morally repugnant. The emotion, induced by the experience seen or imagined close up, provokes the observer's recoil as defined by cultural norms. As such, disgust is performative in spatial terms. Olga Matich argues that movement away from the loathsome image or idea affords the possibility of making the experience cognitively readable or legible, that disgust creates a space in which the individual negotiates her emotional as well as moral response. Yet she claims that aesthetically—and in certain instances ethically—disgust, which is always about the boundaries of the permissible, is also liberating: it offers society, its artists, and their consumers the opportunity to transgress established norms. Through extensive close readings of Petersburg, Matich shows that Belyi's experimental novel does precisely that, challenging the reader not to avert her readerly gaze from that which is unsettling and to appreciate, even to delight in, his shocking metamorphic image-making. She calls Petersburg a modernist exemplar of baroque aesthetics, characterized by excessive affect and grotesque representation, especially of the corpse, invoking the transience of life and dissolution of form.

That it was Peter the Great who introduced tobacco into Russia on a large scale is well known, but the details of this early commerce in what the Russians called “nicotine” are less familiar — for instance, that the tobacco imported was American, that the initiative in opening the trade came largely from America, and that the fulfillment of the contracts became involved in complications that at times approached the burlesque.

There was of course a considerable amount of tobacco consumed in Russia long before the time of Peter. It is true that the use of the “abomination to God” was forbidden by the Orthodox Church on the Biblical grounds that it is not that which entereth into a man that defileth him, but that which proceedeth from him. However, among the foreigners, especially the Germans and the Dutch, and to some extent even among court officials, tobacco was openly smoked in the early sixteen hundreds to such a degree that under Michael Romanov it became necessary to forbid both Russians and foreigners to possess or to “drink” tobacco, or to buy or sell it under pain of death and confiscation of property, a decree to this effect being issued in 1634. Michael's heir, Alexei, was a staunch conservative who frowned upon foreign ways, repeated Michael's anti-tobacco legislation in his Ulozhenie or law code, and even after his quarrel with the Patriarch Nikon continued to uphold the conduct prescribed by the Church.

Steven Rosefielde’s article has two objectives: first, to display the major features and the “revolutionary implications” for Soviet economic history of evidence provided in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; second, to devise “a coherent and consistent countertheory to the prevailing interpretation of Soviet industrialization.” In pursuit of these objectives, he initiates “a complete reconsideration of the causes and consequences of the First Five-Year Plan.”

In no other country of twentieth-century Europe have matters of local government played more havoc both with domestic peace and external security than in Czechoslovakia. Nor does modern history offer a more frustrating story than the process by which an honest, though slow and hesitant, endeavor to meet claims for more local self-government was cunningly and ruthlessly exploited for the very opposite, i.e., for crushing liberty and establishing a rigid totalitarian centralism.

The birth of the Republic itself was met with the bitter opposition of the bulk of its German minority, whose desire, however unrealistic, was to join the new Austrian state. The majority of the Sudeten Germans had scarcely begun to show a change of heart, leaders of their major parties had scarcely begun actively to cooperate with the Czechoslovak Government, when Hitler came to power in Germany, and the Nazi acid quickly corroded the delicate fabric of the fresh Czech-German cooperation.

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's book The Beaten Track (1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying about turisty and turizm as components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared “crowds” of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.

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.

In the search for meaning which its conclusion provokes, a life, inevitably, is scrutinized for patterns, symbols, and general themes; it is read, in short, as a text. Suicide becomes a bloody signature on the bottom of a ragged page, the final and incontrovertible assertion of authorial control over one’s own life. At the same time, however, the suicide relinquishes all future control over everything, including future interpretations of his or her life-as-text. As a Pyrrhic means of giving the planned, narrative structure of a text to life, suicide functions as an uncanny fulcrum between “meaningful” life and “meaningless” death; hence its fascination. The supreme instance of human will triumphing over cruel nature’s whims is also the moment of greatest surrender to death’s lack of meaning. Witnesses and analysts rush in to provide interpretation and theory.

This article focuses on a series of both iconic and little-known paintings, examining the diverse ways in which some of Russia's most prominent nineteenth-century artists such as Karl Briullov, Vasilii Polenov, and Il΄ia Repin depicted Black subjects. Through a combination of close formal readings and broader analyses of the specific contexts in which these images were produced, the article probes a number of complex and interconnected topics such as Russian exceptionalism, imperialist aesthetics, and nationalist versus cosmopolitan pictorial sensibilities. The article likewise pays close attention to the conceptual and material continuities and discontinuities between the first and second halves of the nineteenth century and considers how these paintings might have contributed to the evolving Russian discourses on race, nationality, and empire in the “long” nineteenth century.

The interpolation of other-language material into the primary language of discourse is a well-known phenomenon in the speech of bi- and multilinguals. Social scientists studying bilingualism have termed this practice “code-switching.” In literature, code-switching is potentially available to any writer who commands another language besides his own and is not restricted from its use by literary canon. Practitioners of code-switching in the West include Petronius and Cicero, medieval translators, Rabelais and Montaigne, Sterne, Tolstoy, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, e. e. cummings, Hemingway, and Anthony Burgess. The motives for literary code-switching are many—terminological precision, connotative nuance, citation and allusion, display of erudition, an illusion of verisimilitude, irony, and word play.

Recent interpretations of the first Five-Year Plan have taken two main approaches. One has emphasized the exploitation of workers and peasants by the party elite throughout the years of the first two Five-Year Plans. In explaining the evolution of labor policies and laws that bound the workers to jobs, Robert Conquest and Solomon Schwarz emphasize the personal responsibility of Stalin, who demanded rapid expansion of industrialization and brooked no questioning of his views. To obey him and to protect their political futures, his officials used tough policies designed to produce quick, visible results. Both authors describe a linear development of ever harsher proscriptions and penalties, and they attribute greater coherence to the process and greater effectiveness to the laws than actually existed. Both see the process from the viewpoint of the capital, disregard the competing ideas among the leaders, and neglect the local level where policies had to be executed and were often changed or ignored.

All’s quiet now. Summer vacation has started, the halls and classrooms are deserted. Almost. It is 10 July 1992 and I am inside Moscow’s School No. 175 with Vladimir Dmitrievich Nikolaev, a pupil here from 1933 to 1941. Once this was School No. 25, hallowed ground, from 1931 to 1937 the most famous school in the Soviet Union, where a talented teaching corps instructed the children of Stalin and other representatives of the Soviet elite. The winner of many awards, School No. 25 was the object of my research for several years. It's a bit unnerving to imagine the sounds and images of the people who worked and played in these very rooms sixty years ago. Nikolaev interrupts, then enhances the experience: “This was the library; the deputy director’s office was here; Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, and I were in the same literature class there.”

A Russian proverb knowingly reminds us that “the law is like a wagon-tongue —whichever way you point it, there it goes.” It is useful to remember this observation when examining the position of the Jews in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. The legal basis for that position, which was characterized by exclusion and discrimination, has commonly been traced to the period from 1772 to 1796, when Russia's Jews first entered the empire in large numbers. This study will describe the creation of the legal “wagon-tongue” during the late eighteenth century, and will suggest that the legal precedents cannot be understood by only considering the directions in which the law was later to be pointed. Emphasis will be placed on the initial evolution of an ad hoc body of law, confused, contradictory, and ambiguous, capable of subsequent interpretation and elaboration with either sympathy or hostility.