Some poets are astonishingly precocious: Arthur Rimbaud, for example, wrote everything he had to write by the time he was nineteen. Nikolai Morshen’s development as a poet offers an opposite example. Gradually maturing in a leisurely and deliberate manner over almost four decades, this poet’s work, when viewed in its totality, is a study in ever deepening philosophical thought and ever more finely honed verbal mastery. The stages of Morshen’s development and their chronology are obvious enough: the verse of 1936 to 1946 (written prior to Morshen’s first published collection and, for the most part, not included in it); the three published books of verse, Tiulen' (The Seal, 1959), Dvoetochie (Punctuation: Colon, 1967), and Ekho i zerkalo (The Echo and the Mirror, 1979); and a few poems that have appeared in émigré journals from his fourth, unpublished collection, “Umolkshii zhavoronok” (“The Now-Silent Lark”).

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.

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

From 1906 to 1914 C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud exchanged 360 personal letters, most of them mailed between Zürich and Vienna. These years saw the consolidation of an international Freudian school by 1909 and multiple schisms within the movement, from the defection of Adler in 1911 to the final alienation of Jung himself. Given the era and the specific localities, it is not surprising to find that Russians and Russian political issues now and then figure, oddly and elliptically, among the welter of topics raised in the Freud-Jung Briefwechsel. Out of the fragmented data an incident of sorts emerges, with a Russian cast in the role of seductress (later heroine), Jung as victim (and unwitting villain), and Freud himself intervening “Sherlock Holmes-like” (as he put it) to help solve the case. Beyond its intrinsic and eccentric appeal, the material holds a three-fold historic significance for the Slavicist.

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.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1898-1975) is currently one of the most respected thinkers in Soviet literary criticism of the twentieth century. His compendious knowledge of world literature, his sensitivity to difference and historical continuity in art, and his ability to formulate precisely the opaque relationships between the author, his text, and his reader indicate a genius that is enviable and perhaps inimitable.

Polish-Russian relations have from their very beginning been characterized by intense political rivalry and military confrontation. This is no surprise, since after the Polish-Lithuanian union (1386, 1569), Poland was drawn into the conflict between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the great Muscovite principality over hegemony in Eastern Europe. Struggles between Lithuania and Muscovy were thus transformed into wars between the Russian state and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. During the reigns of Polish kings Stefan Batory (1576–86), Zygmunt III (1587–1632), and Wladyslaw IV (1632–48), the commonwealth gained a military advantage over its eastern neighbor. This was especially evident during the Time of Troubles (smutnoe vremia), when the Polish army occupied Moscow (1610–12) and when Wladyslaw IV defeated the Russians in the War of Smolensk (1632–34).

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.

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the “peasant yokel” who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a “half-literate intellectual,” sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.

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.

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.