On 6 July 1874, the government of Alexander II published an edict announcing the formation of a mounted Bashkir squadron in the Orenburg guberniia. The modest scale of the endeavor—a squadron-sized element added little to Russian military strength—belied its historic importance. The Bashkirs, in 1874, stood at a watershed in their long history of military service to Russia marking the divide between decades of irregular frontier duty and inclusion in the ranks of the regular army. The evolution of Bashkir military formations, paralleling the course of social change, offers a most instructive case in little-studied aspects of imperial policy towards subject national minorities and their employment in the armed forces in particular. A virtually forgotten component in Russia's rich military tradition, the contribution of “native” units organized among the inorodtsy of the Caucasus, the Crimea, and Asia was indeed significant.

The Soviet Nationalities Collection at Columbia University is one of the largest and most varied collections of its kind in the nation. Established in the 1960s, it now numbers more than 15,000 volumes in forty-seven different languages from the Altaic, Transcaucasian, Uralic, Paleo-Siberian, and Indo-European language groups. It grows at a rate of about 500 books a year.

The collection supports instruction and research in fields including language and literature, political science, economics, history, folklore, religion and philosophy, and the arts. Although not cataloged until recently, the collection has long been used by scholars from research centers at Columbia, such as the Harriman Institute for the Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, the Center for the Study of Central Asia, the Program on Soviet Nationality Problems, and the Department of Slavic Languages. Its reputation growing by word-of-mouth, the collection has also attracted visiting scholars and requests through interlibrary loan.

In 1920 the Polish army defeated the Bolsheviks before the gates of Warsaw. The Polish victory preserved the independence of the reborn state, delayed Russian expansion for a generation, and left to historians a number of controversial issues. Certainly the most passionately debated aspect of the war is the authorship of the Polish victory. Gradually western scholarship has come to credit the laurels to Poland's Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but there are still those who emphasize the role of other Polish soldiers or of the Frenchman, General Maxime Weygand. From the midst of this historiographical controversy, we may discern the dim outlines of a simultaneous, yet obscured episode: the aborted political comeback of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. It is the purpose of this essay to reconstruct the latter against the background of the former.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn has immortalized Soviet camp literature. In contrast, Yugoslav prison and camp literature is virtually unknown. Yet, if literature indeed mirrors the human soul and even a nation's conscience—as Solzhenitsyn intimates— then it may also convey the human experience across time and space, language and culture. The question arises: Is camp and prison literature merely a sigh of wronged souls or is it a literary genre in its own right? If it is a genre, is it accessible at all to those not initiated in the Sisyphus-like context of human suffering etched into the world's Gulag archipelagos of prisons and forced labor camps? Let us assume for the sake of argument that it is, indeed, accessible to outsiders. The question still remains: Why bother with prison or camp literature— those heavy sighs of distraught creatures—rhyme or not? The answer is that if we forget camp literature, we might forget our own selves.

One of the most striking innovations in late eighteenth century prose fiction was the introduction of a distinct narrator's voice. To throw some light on the emergence of this innovation, I will compare three works: “Povest’ o Frole Skobeeve,“ an anonymous work from the 1720s; Ivan Novikov's “Novgorodskikh devushek sviatochnyi vecher,” which appeared in a 1785 collection of his short stories; and Nikolai Karamzin's “Natal'ia, boiarskaia doch',” which appeared serially in his Moskovskii zhurnal in 1792. These works will be viewed as representative of three stages in the eighteenth century development of narrative prose structure.