Sacha Baron Cohen maps a cultural background for his “Borat” character by creating a hyperreal Kazakhstan that is based, nonetheless, on gradations of a “real,” yet Orientalized, eastern Europe and Balkan region. Having no cultural connections to its actual Central Asian namesake, “Borat's Kazakhstan” is a Baudrillardian simulacrum because, for a western filmgoer, it essentially replaces the original. Scratching beneath the surface, however, we see that Baron Cohen composes his clown-journalist using exotic, yet familiar, “realities” from the “Other” in Europe's backyard. Using Edward Said's Orientalism (along with Milica Bakić-Hayden's and Maria Todorova's modifications of the idea), Dickie Wallace describes how this discursive bricolage of eastern European and Balkan music, language, folkloristic rituals, and archetypes, as well as continual tabu violations and commonsensical acceptance of violence, gives the character the sharp parodic elements that have had western audiences laughing even while wincing as they recognize themselves in this “Other.“

In this article, Svetlana Boym proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the everyday practices in the gulag at the crossroads of literature, political theory, and history. Boym places Soviet accounts of the gulag in the comparative context of the twentieth-century reflection on totalitarianism and terror by drawing on Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil, judgment, and imagination. There is something inassimilable in Varlam Shalamov's prose: it confronts the experience of extremity but does not offer redemption. It resorts to the mimicry of Soviet discourse and the technologies of the gulag, but only to challenge any coherent conception of Soviet subjectivity, either enthusiastic or defiant. Boym examines Shalamov's uses of clichés, attention to intonation, blemish, mimicry, and estrangement. Instead of performing ideology, Shalamov's Kolyma Tales expose the breaking points of Russian and Soviet cultural myths, giving new insight into reading historical documents and understanding gulag memory in post-Soviet Russia.

In this article Aaron Beaver analyzes two elegies written by Joseph Brodsky—one for his father (“Pamiati ottsa: Avstraliia“) and one for his mother (“Mysl’ o tebe udaliaetsia …“). The point of departure is Brodsky's appropriation of the genre from his Silver Age predecessors (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandel'shtam, Marina Tsvetaeva), as made evident in a number of Brodsky's well-known essays. Beaver's central thesis is that Brodsky reshapes the elegy by centering it not on the death of the loved one but on time. Brodsky is inspired in this endeavor by his Silver Age forebears, but he extends their poetic practice into more philosophical territory. Specifically, close reading of Brodsky's two elegies exposes a model of time consistent with the temporal idealism elaborated by Jean- Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness. Based on this exegesis Beaver ventures to generalize about the nature of lyricism in Brodsky's verse, arguing that it is inseparable from his philosophical assumptions.

The first translations of Sigmund Freud's texts into Russian appeared in the early 1900s, and by the 1920s all important works were available; in Soviet Russia they stimulated wide discussion of various medical, pedagogical, and social problems as well as of developments in creative art. Alexei Kurbanovsky argues that “Freudianism” would have seemed very tempting to those early Soviet theorists who believed that they must appropriate the relevant discoveries of western psychology and adopt them for their own revolutionary ends: creating the “new communist man.” The application of Freudian techniques to the analysis of some classical Russian writers as well as painters is documented in writings from the 1920s by Ivan Ermakov; the artistic tendencies of the Russian avant-garde were quite often viewed as reflecting the latest achievements of science and technology. So aspiring Soviet critics might well have attempted psychoanalytical “readings“ of innovatory artifacts. Vladimir Tatlin stands as one of their possible model cases. Kurbanovsky argues that Tatlin's famous spiral tower could be psychoanalytically interpreted in reference to the Oedipal “refutation of father-figures.” Such an interpretation seems in tune with the general cultural climate where other phenomena (such as the October revolution) were seen as having a “hidden, Freudian aspect.” Examining the psychoanalytical underpinnings of the theory of Soviet avant-garde allows us to more fully appreciate its historical and cultural significance.

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.

At the turn of the twentieth century, European critics who were distressed about contemporary developments in the fine arts tended to use medical, psychopathological terms to diagnose the existing state of the field. In 1892-1893, an Austrian physician and writer, Max Nordau, published Entartung (Degeneration). Drawing on positivist psychology and anthropometry, Nordau expressed his pessimistic views on the mental and physical health of the leading figures of European fin-de-siécle culture: Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, the impressionists, the symbolists, and many others. In Russia this book went into nine editions, in three different translations. The patriarch of Russian liberal-nationalist criticism, Vladimir Stasov applied Nordau's metaphors to Russian “decadent” artists in such reviews as “Podvorl'e prokazhennykh” (Lepers’ inn, 1899) or “Dve dekadentskie vystavki” (Two decadent exhibitions, 1903). He sarcastically remarked that, when viewing canvases by some contemporary painters, he felt as though he were “walking amidst a madhouse.”

The impact of neither Andrei Belyi nor Velimir Khlebnikov has been fully comprehended, and their legacies are joined in unusual combination in the work of the contemporary visual poet Elizaveta Mnatsakanova. Her poetry appeals to both eye and ear, expanding on innovations introduced by Belyi and Khlebnikov, and it raises broad questions about the integration of sensory experiences by readers of visual poetry. Mnatsakanova uses illustrative handwriting, calligraphy, and images of a hand or a face in her one-of-a-kind albums and books, and her poems are set out in symmetrical columns or other spatial arrangements. Repetition is the central rhetorical device in her work, yet her unique albums emphasize individualized aesthetic production and anticipate highly charged reader reaction. Special attention is paid to “Das Hohelied,” a part of Das Buch Sabeth, which engages both the literary tradition and the immediacy of a reader's experience with the text.

A primary mechanism of rule in soft authoritarian post-Soviet Kazakhstan was the regime's ability to monopolize the instruments of persuasion. By carefully crafting and propagating images of state and society, constructing political dramas, and developing plausible public narratives about the provision of public goods, Nursultan Nazarbaev continually outflanked his political opponents. And then came Borat, the Hollywood comedy that presented Kazakhstan as a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, economic, and political backwater. Not only were the images of this “Kazakhstan“ out of the regime's control, but the film's creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, went on the image-making offensive by conducting a variety of public dramas that further eroded the regime's image-making monopoly. This essay explores how the transnationalization of image-making creates new challenges for regimes intent on remaining soft authoritarian.

In 1831, the journal Teleskop published Princess Zinaida Volkonskaia's proposal for a national art museum in Moscow. Volkonskaia's project was progressive to a degree (Russia had no such museum at the time), yet the model she proposed was highly traditional. She excluded Russian art entirely, despite her support of modern Russian artists. Instead, Volkonskaia privileged classical and more recent western European art, underlining the deference to western practice that influenced cultural politics even as Russia moved toward a stronger national sense of self. Volkonskaia's project marks an important juncture in Russia's cultural history: the intersection of aristocratic female patronage and the institutionalization of academic procedure. It also provides a platform from which to consider Russia's self-image vis-à-vis Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic campaigns. By tracing an intricate dialogue in which national pride developed alongside continuing admiration for neoclassical ideals, Rosalind P. Blakesley addresses the paradoxes of Volkonskaia's project, and the difficulties of conceptualizing a “national” space of artistic display. Volkonskaia's project poses significant interpretive problems and her exclusion of Russian art prefigures the segregation of Russian and western art in Russian museums today, which has marginalized Russian art even within Russia itself. Volkonskaia's project thus has wide resonance, for the question of whether and how museums encapsulate national cultural identities remains an issue of great intellectual concern.

Since 1991, the Eurasian republic of Kazakhstan has endeavored to build a recognizable and credible national brand as a resource-rich, multicultural, and stable outpost in an otherwise troubled region of the globe. It is therefore not surprising that Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of die fictitious Kazakhstani reporter “Borat Sagdiyev,” touched a raw nerve with his parody of the country and its people as bigoted and backward. While the Borat satire is both grotesque and spurious, the success of the motion picture Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has provided Kazakhstan with a precipitous increase in its global profile. Using the analytical tool of “nation branding,“ Robert A. Saunders discusses the challenges and opportunities the Borat film presented to the government of Kazakhstan. After some false starts, Kazakhstan has entered into a querulous but symbiotic relationship with Borat's creator to promote its own efforts to build a brand state and hone its national image in the west.

'Violating the Canon” makes the case for an alternative Jewish and literary space in the context of Soviet war literature by comparing works by Vasilii Grossman, Il'ia Erenburg, and the Yiddish author Der Nister. In this article, Harriet Murav distinguishes the question of literary value from the question of identity and separates out the problem of determining the typicality or representativeness of a work from the problem of engaging the complexity of its meanings. Jewish literature from the Soviet Union ought to be recovered from the constraints that subordinate it to Cold War-era sociological and political constraints. Mikhail Bakhtin, Werner Sollors, and Michael Warner provide approaches that allow access to more fluid and open-ended readings.

“Heresy” is developed here as an analytical term for the criminalization of speech questioning the basic tenets of a belief system, such as internal criticisms of state socialism or denial of the applicability of the term genocide to some mass crimes in a European Union that purports to make central the protection of human rights. European legislation to criminalize “genocide denial” is critiqued through a close analysis of international legal decisions dealing with whether “genocide” took place in the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Although granting both the facts as these courts found them and the serious criminality of the actions involved, Robert M. Hayden argues that calling them “genocide” broadens the definition of that term to the extent of losing the possibility of uniform application. Criminalizing “genocide denial” is thus not only contrary to principles of free speech and intellectual inquiry but manifests the same problem that Amnesty International identified in its reports in the 1980s on the vagueness of the “verbal crimes” provisions of the criminal laws of the formerly socialist countries. Hayden concludes that the punishment of heresy is a manifestation of power by a political elite that holds its values and assumptions to be immune from challenge.

This comment responds to Robert M. Hayden's concerns by highlighting the importance of contextualizing definitions of genocide and by advocating that determinations of genocide be legally defined. Sari Wastell argues that legal determinations are contingent and contestable when established as “adjudicated facts,” that the law is the most appropriate venue for broaching these debates, and that the proposed genocide denial legislation that worries Hayden cannot target legitimate inquiry into the coherence of legal definitions of the crime of genocide. While reports, rumors, and accusations of genocidal activity might well be the impetus for the establishment of ad hoc tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the existence of these international bodies is precisely aimed at determining the “truth” of these claims in a legal sense.

Authors writing in a language other than their native tongue have become a common phenomenon in an era of increased international mobility. This article is devoted to three Russian-born émigré writers—Andreï Makine (b. 1957), Wladimir Kaminer (b. 1967), and Gary Shteyngart (b. 1972)—all of whom have achieved literary stardom with books written in French, German, and English, respectively. Although each of the three authors has a distinctive style and ideological position, in his own way each projects a “Russian” persona to the western public. Using the notion of cultural hybridity, Adrian Wanner explores the various strategies these authors have adopted in fashioning an identity for themselves that is tailored to meet the demands of the reading public in their respective host nations while exploiting the cachet of the Russian “brand name” in today's global literary economy.

As the present collection of articles makes clear, there is no shortage of interpretations of or reactions to Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. While nothing drains the laughter out of a joke faster than academic analysis, these articles succeed in raising differing, thought-provoking perspectives on the meaning and significance of one of the biggest cultural phenomena of 2006. And although their methodological and analytical perspectives diverge, these articles share at least one trait in common. Each author faces grappling with the relationship between the Kazakhstan of Sacha Baron Cohen's imagination and, dare I say, the “real Kazakhstan,” a real place inhabited by real people, existing in real time and space. I do not dispute the subjectivity of that reality, but the acceptance of the premise that Kazakhstan and Kazakhstanis in fact exist is essential to my argument, which seeks not to place the country and its people on a level playing field with their hyperreal corollary, but to underscore the power relations that come into play when eroding or rendering insignificant the line between them.

Organized by a Moscow learned society, the Polytechnical Exposition of 1872 helped mobilize resources for popularizing science that connected tsarist officialdom, the Moscow municipal government and business community, university scientists, and other private associations. Although the relationship between the autocratic government and society is often portrayed in terms of conflict, partnership was more typically the rule, especially in the effort to build a native science infrastructure. The grand exhibitions of science and industry of the nineteenth century were sites of modernity that displayed visions of progress, created a public culture, and fashioned national identity. Moscow's Polytechnical Exposition juxtaposed the modern and the foreign with the traditional and the Russian in order to demonstrate that Russia could have modern science and technology without abandoning its traditional culture. Paradoxically, to assert its place in European civilization in an age of nationalism and imperialism, Russia had to assert its Russianness—its cultural distinctiveness, patriotism, and imperial pride. With its emphasis on change and progress, as well as on traditional Russian culture, the exposition fostered a Russian public aware of its place in a changing world, of its place in history, of its identity as a nation.

In this essay Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone examine some of the paradigms of selfhood that western scholars have used to understand Soviet subjectivity. They start with an analysis of how racialized western discourses about the backward Russian national character were transformed into representations of the totalitarian Soviet self seen as a passive receptacle for the ideological excesses of the regime. Revisionist historians have argued against this model and have shown how the pragmatic Soviet subject both internalized and resisted the Soviet norms of selfhood. In the third wave, scholars have used the model of the normative self to plot the internal processes through which citizens attempted to align their souls with the demands of Stalinist ideology. Chatterjee and Petrone conclude with the scholars’ analysis of the banal self, or the situation of Soviet selfhood in intimate and private spheres of existence that necessitated multiple negotiations and compromises with the theoretical norms of statesponsored subjectivity.

This is a participant's account of the movement in Soviet history during the 1970s and 1980s known as “revisionism,” which Sheila Fitzpatrick understands as an iconoclastic challenge by social historians to the dominance in Sovietology of political scientists and the totalitarian model. Particular attention is paid to the debates on the nature of Stalinism, which in the context of the Cold War became highly politicized and bitterly polemical, as well as to internal arguments: for example, between Marxists and non-Marxists and between first- and second-generation revisionists. Revisionists’ early interest in questions of social support and later focus on resistance is discussed. The essay offers an assessment of the intellectual and historiographical contribution of revisionism, including an appreciation of contingency, a new approach to power and the interplay of government and society, new standards of historical professionalism, and an emphasis on archives and primary sources. Finally, a line of continuity between revisionism and its 1990s challenger, “post-revisionism,” is suggested. Comments are provided by Robert V Daniels, J. Arch Getty, Elena A. Osokina, and Jochen Hellbeck.

Robert M. Hayden raises two very significant issues: He argues against laws that criminalize genocide denial, and he challenges the notion that a genocide occurred in Srebenica during the ex-Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. Yet Hayden misreads the basis of the Hague Tribunal's genocide conviction in the Krstićcase and raises faulty comparisons in regard to limitations on free speech. The fundamental basis of the Tribunal's decision was that by killing seven to eight thousand Muslim men, Serb nationalists intended to prevent the Srebenica Muslim community from reproducing. Genocide denial laws have little in common with attacks on heresy in the medieval and early modern past. Moreover, a full consideraton of the problem of genocide and free speech would have to include cases in which the affirmation of genocide is criminalized, as in contemporary Turkey.

This forum has attracted six richly varied responses to Larry Charles's film Borat. That Slavic Review would bring together, among others, a political scientist, an anthropologist, a historian, and two ethnographers (if I discern their fields correctly) to discuss a Hollywood film attests both to the journal's vitality and to the film's skill in marshalling interesting questions. In light of the range of issues raised here, my comments attempt, with inconsistent success, to restrict themselves to the questions broached in the preceding essays, rather than supplying an altogether new line of argument.