Sasha Sokolov is the author of three remarkably different novels. The first, A School for Fools (1976), tells of a schizophrenic adolescent and his attempts to come to terms with the elemental experiences of sex and death in the small world of his special school, his family, and the dacha community where they summer. The second, Between Dog and Wolf (1980), is a complex tale of vengeance and violence. The hero, an elderly, one-legged, itinerant grinder named Il'ia, beats off a supposed wolf with his crutches. The dog, for such it is, belongs to Iakov, a game warden, who in revenge steals Il'ia's crutches. Their feud escalates. The grinder kills two of the gamekeeper's dogs and is eventually drowned by their owner who, unbeknownst to either, may be his son. Sokolov's newest novel, The Epic of Palisandr (1985), relates the adventures of its hero, Palisandr Dal'berg, “Son of the Kremlin.“

A great many available statistics describe the population history of Russia, but explanations for these statistics are limited or nonexistent. The useful studies of fertility and migration that have appeared are primarily accurate reports of what happened. Studies of Russian mortality are wholly lacking, an understandable situation, since as late as 1913 only thirteen out of fifty provinces of European Russia had medical statistical bureaus. Despite all past efforts the history of Russia's health remains obscure.

While the health of the Russian people today is comparable to that of other Europeans, before the Revolution of 1917 it was extremely poor. In 1897, the year of the first national Russian census, the infant mortality rate for European Russia was 260 for each 1,000 births, compared to 222 for Germany, 164 for France, 156 for Italy, 156 for England and Wales, and 109 for Ireland.

Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandel'shtam's most autobiographically engaged masterpiece of the 1930s is no ordinary journey.2 Written in Moscow during the summer of 1931, a year after his six-month sojourn in Armenia and Georgia, this contemplative journey adheres to an “itinerary” shaped by the path Mandel'shtam followed both in his quest for truth—“that truth which helps us to form a better sense of ourselves in tradition”—and in his search for a method to articulate that truth—a “method of creative cognition, a suitable means of gaining a sense of life.” His “method of creative cognition” mediates between the poet's contemplation of contemporary reality and his meditation on the mystery of creation, or the creative impulse, whose origins he seeks in the deepest structures of language and legend, whose eternal principles he ponders in the organic phenomena of nature, and whose multiplicity of expression he experiences in the art, architecture, and archaeology of Armenia.

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

In the January 1984 issue of Soviet Studies, I published an article, “Is There a Generation Gap in the Soviet Political Establishment?: Demand Articulation by RSFSR Provincial Party First Secretaries,“ based on examination of 466 articles signed by twenty-four obkom and kraikom first secretaries and published between January 1976 and March 1981. I was interested in seeing whether differences in the content of published articles correlated strongly with generational differences within this sample of regional party leaders. The claim has frequently been made that the post-Stalin generation of Soviet officials is more demanding and impatient than the Stalin generation. My research was geared toward seeing whether the articles attributed to these secretaries reflected such differences.

The social conditions for scientific work in the Stalin era are often assumed to have been patterned more or less after Lysenkoism and Soviet genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Much less is known about other areas of Soviet science in the same period. Were Lysenkoism and the fate of genetics typical or atypical of what was happening in other areas of Soviet science under Stalin? The case of Vladimir I. Vernadskii, an earth scientist, and his scientific school in the years between 1928 and 1945 documents the survival and development of an important tradition very different from that of Lysenkoism and suggests something about the mentality of one segment of the scientific intelligentsia with strong ties to prerevolutionary Russian science. The fate of the Vernadskii school suggests something of the diversity and complexity of Soviet science, even during the worst years of the Stalinist regime and illuminates some of the ways Soviet scientists like Vernadskii were able to protect their scientific enterprises and continue a critical tradition in Russian science despite political interference.

Some of the few moments of comic relief to be found in Muscovite historical texts are provided in Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin's description of the Muscovite government. Kotoshikhin was an undersecretary (pod'iachii) of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Posol'skii prikaz) who defected to Sweden and in 1666-1667 wrote an account of Muscovy's court and administration. He is the source of the dubious assertion that the tsar's daughters (tsarevny) were not married outside the country because they were stupid and illiterate and would bring shame on the tsar's family. Kotoshikhin also relates a comical episode in which a leading boyar refused to sit at a banquet next to a man he considered his social inferior. The protesting boyar was forcibly held at his assigned place while he kicked and screamed and finally wriggled out of the grasp of the tsar's attendants and slid under the table, rather than sit by a demeaning dinner partner.

Few would dispute the claim that the razverstka, the Bolshevik method of grain procurement, was a centerpiece of “war communism.” Yet there exists no adequate treatment of the razverstka in the scholarly literature, and indeed there is widespread confusion about the nature and purposes of the razverstka policy as well as about the circumstances of its introduction and its replacement in 1921 by a food-supply tax (prodnalog). A closer look at the actual razverstka reveals some surprising features and in the end casts doubt on the validity and usefulness of the war communism notion itself.

The razverstka was introduced in the second half of 1918 as a result of experience in trying to enforce a state grain monopoly by means of the foodsupply dictatorship decreed in spring 1918. To understand the razverstka method we must first look at the more ambitious aims of the previous policy of a fullfledged grain monopoly.

“One of Nekrasov's very greatest works, the long poem Moroz, Krasnyi Nos, which by virtue of its profound penetration into the life of the peasant and its powerful pictorial and lyrical style transcends almost everything which has been written about the Russian countryside, has yet to be studied [izucheno] in our country.” So wrote Kornei Chukovskii a quarter of a century ago.

The critic's complaint was surely exaggerated. After all, one of the century's most eminent Nekrasov scholars, Vladislav E. Evgen'ev-Maksimov, had given the poem his serious and sustained attention, and lesser investigators have in the last fifty years significantly increased our understanding of its metrical, folkloric, and polemical aspects. These critical forays notwithstanding, in a sense Chukovskii's statement holds true to this day. For if it is agreed that what we expect most from criticism is an expanded understanding of what a literary work is about; if, in other words, it is the critic as exegete whom we value most highly (there are of course those who would dispute the premise), then Moroz, Krasnyi Nos has indeed been neglected. For, more than 120 years after its publication a serious hermaneutic study of this famous poem is still wanting.

The drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture in the winter of 1930 was “spontaneous“ (stikhiinyi) in the extreme. Spontaneous, in this context, is not a synonym for voluntary; instead, it denotes the process by which collectivization was implemented from January to March 1930. This process was characterized by a deficit in organization and order, a revolutionary impulsiveness tempered by neither law nor legality, and, perhaps most of all, “teleological planning“ based on constant upward revisions of numerical indicators as plans and directives were passed down the hierarchical chain of regional command. Central control, in the traditional sense, was nonexistent or ineffective; control, central or otherwise, seemingly so pervasive in “Stalinist” collectivization, is simply a misnomer for the arbitrary coercion that prevailed at the time and was predicated, in large part, upon the very absence of such control.

In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it stands for. “Slovo ved' bol'she veshch', chem veshch': ono samo veshch', kotoraia tol'ko znak.” The signifier comes first and the signified trails after it, for the acoustic properties of the word expand its capability beyond mere denotation to poetic creation. The proper name too, far from being a mere representation in Tsvetaeva's view, draws its bearer into a broad range of associations and creates a complex personal universe that can be discovered by means of the poet's “khozhdenie po slukhu.”

From general observations on the importance Tsvetaeva ascribed to names in a variety of works, this paper will proceed to an examination of her 1916 dedication to Aleksandr Blok, “Imia tvoe—ptitsa v ruke.” Analysis of this remarkable poem demonstrates vividly Tsvetaeva's realization of the creative potential of Blok's name. This specific example will provide the basis for a discussion of the broader implications of naming in Tsvetaeva's art.

The events of the last years of NEP—the New Economic Policy—confront historians with two complex and still controversial issues: the effect of these “new” policies on the Russian economy, on society, and on methods of Communist rule in the country and the political conflict dividing the party leadership in the late 1920s. The first issue raises the question of the extent to which NEP was evolving in a direction compatible with the Communists' dream of a socialist society, with the short-term political needs of the Soviet state, and with the priorities of economic development. The second issue focuses on the political instability generated by the controversy over domestic policy and methods of rule, as well as by the personal antagonism between the two key political leaders, Nikolai Bukharin and Stalin. The debate on these questions, answers to which are crucial to our understanding of the origins of Stalinism, has for the most part relied on evidence drawn from central party and state activities, giving the discussion a panoramic view of the history of those years.

Russian folk wisdom regarded the daughter-in-law, the snokha (a word that also meant sister-in-law), as a source of family friction. Unable to coexist in the cramped quarters of the peasant hut, or izba, where a mother-in-law ruled over the stove and a father-in-law kept watch on the family purse, the daughter-inlaw supposedly made evident her discontent. A host of proverbs and folk sayings attest to the idea of the snokha as troublemaker: the saying that the daughter-in-law “likes the family hands but resents the family pot” summed up this resentment. According to this view, the daughter-in-law took but did not give.

Twentieth-century historians, influenced perhaps by Soviet interpretations as well as by literary impressions, see the peasant daughter-in-law in the prerevolutionary era not as a source of friction but rather as a helpless victim of family hostility: a husband's beatings, a mother-in-law's tyranny, a father-in-law's sexual harassment.

In the last decades of Imperial Russia, peasant migrants from all over Russia swelled the ranks of urban dwellers. Impelled by the increasing impoverishment of their villages and the hope of a steady wage, they poured into the cities, some to remain for months or years, others to stay for life. The number of male migrants always exceeded the number of female, although the proportion of women was growing steadily. Even so, the majority of men either remained single or left wives and children in the village.

Thus far, the attention of most social historians has focused on the migrant: his relation to the means of production; the extent to which his experiences in city and factory contributed to the transformation of his consciousness from peasant to proletarian. This approach has yielded rich scholarly results. But, with the exception of the work of Rose Glickman, that scholarship has addressed the peasant migrant almost exclusively as male and regarded his relation to his village primarily as an obstacle on the path to proletarianization.

Ever since its publication the success of Fedor Dostoevskii's first novel Poor Folk has been ascribed primarily to the characterization of its “naturalistic” hero, Makar Devushkin, not to its sentimental heroine, Varen'ka Dobroselova. Although critics have continued to discover new merits in Poor Folk, in the end it is Devushkin who dominates the novel and on whom, in one way or another, most of its virtues depend. Not only is Devushkin the protagonist, he is also at the center of the novel's important innovations in style, theme, and characterization. Dostoevskii took the poor copying clerk, a type that for a decade had been used as a stock device—and most often the butt—of Russian comic fiction, and transformed him into the hero of a tragi-comic sentimental novel. This transformation was much abetted by Dostoevskii's use of the epistolary form— a form common to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, but long outdated in Russia by the 1840s—for it permitted the hero to tell his own story and, by so doing, to reveal the sensitive human being behind the comic mask.

Since its first appearance in 1971, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Avgust Chetyrnadtsatogo (henceforth to be referred to as August 1914) has been compared to, and measured by the standards of, Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace. One might say that both the subject of the novel and the scope of the historical events described in it, as well as its numerous references to Tolstoi, made such comparisons inevitable. Even though virtually all critics were unanimous that Tolstoi was a predominant presence in Solzhenitsyn's mind when he was writing the first “knot” of the multivolume novel cycle, they disagreed about the precise nature of Solzhenitsyn's relationship to Tolstoi. While some critics have been more inclined to see Solzhenitsyn's novel as an emulation of Tolstoi's masterpiece, others have emphasized the antagonistic and polemic quality of Solzhenitsyn's attitudes toward his predecessor—whether Tolstoi the “historiosoph” of War and Peace (1865— 1869) or Tolstoi the moralist and aesthetician of the later period.