Boris El'tsin's abrupt departure from the presidency on New Year's Eve 1999 began a new phase in Russia's postcommunist political development. With the presidency no longer occupied by the author of the constitution, the question arises whether his successor will consider himself more bound by the constitutional arrangements in place since 1993, or less. Rather than to speculate on Vladimir Putin's political personality, this paper will instead examine the record of president-parliament relations since 1993 for indications concerning whether Russia's institutions have begun to settle into those of a consolidated constitutional democracy.

In response to his banishment to barbaric Tomis, on the Black Sea, in 8 C.E., Ovid composed the Tristia, entreaties to Emperor Augustus to permit his return to civilized Rome. Feeling equally alienated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Czech expatriate poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, produced the slim collection Tristium Vindobona. One poem, “První dojmy” (First impressions), finds Machar's narrator and alter ego tormented by visions of an otherworldly and unattainable Prague. “Na Kahlenbergu” (On Kahlenberg) takes the narrator to the eponymous hill outside Vienna, where he invokes his distressed land to the north. The legacy of Habsburg dominion over the Czechs appears to him as a “wide and bloody path“ spanning historical battlegrounds from Diirnkrut, near Vienna, to the White Mountain, west of Prague. Czech critics in 1893 hailed Tristium as both a literary and a political event, its stature enhanced by its publication under the “shadow of bayonets,” that is, during an official state of emergency in Prague. The young critic Emanuel z Čenkova raised only an amicable objection in his review in Literární listy: Machar's narrator could easily come home—eluding reverie and history—since “express trains cross like lightning” between Vienna and Prague.

Sir George Buchanan, Great Britain's ambassador to Russia during World War I, published his widely read memoirs in 1923. In those pages, he provided an influential account of the response of the Russian people to Germany's declaration of war:

While the development of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism has received considerable scholarly attention, it has almost always focused on how the intelligentsia became the standard-bearers of Polish national consciousness. As a result, we know very little about how other members of Polish society constructed national identities. This is particularly perplexing when it comes to studying Russian Poland's workers, for there was no dearth of Polish nationalist activity among these workers. National demands articulated by Łodź's Polish workers during strikes in 1892, for example, inspired a group of social democrats to abandon internationalism and instead create the Polish Socialist Party (PPS). During the revolution of 1905, nationalism once again assumed an important place in both working-class protest and organization. Workers played a prominent role in the Polish school strikes. They also supported and sustained a uniquely Polish phenomena—a nationalist working-class political party, the National Union of Workers (NZR). Although the NZR and its constituent trade unions could be found within every industry within Russian Poland, the organization gained its greatest foothold within the textile industry. Moreover, it was within the textile industry in 1906 where bitter debates between nationalist and socialist workers erupted in violence after a disgruntled weaver from the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) concluded a political argument with an NZR coworker by gunning him down in the street.

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

It is widely accepted that Russia's failure in the Great War derived from the fact that its peasants were not “citizens.” Peasants remained isolated and particularistic, in part because Russia's elites had failed to integrate them politically or culturally into anything resembling a “nation.” When Russian peasants dreamed, it was not as members of an “imagined community” but as peasants, with their own agenda of land and local power and in their own language and cultural codes. As a result, Russia did not represent a “nation at arms,” and most peasants lacked deep commitment to or understanding of their country's war effort.

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film, Austeria (The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for his Mother Joanna of the Angels (a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella, Austeria, a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime, Austeria was widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

In both Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry and her life, sexuality plays an intensely ambiguous role; she vacillates between the belief that the body is merely a “wall” hiding the soul, and the contradictory belief that sexual intimacy is the necessary vehicle to spiritual transcendence. Tsvetaeva's personal sexual adventurousness is by now a well-known fact of her biography; yet this fact is not simply a result of the poet's rebellious nature but is, rather, evidence of a profound philosophical inquiry into the very nature of sex and sexuality that she sustained throughout the course of her life and her writing. Sex is the idiom in which she writes transcendence of her own limiting subjectivity, via an exit into the radical alterity represented by the figure of the beloved.

Historians of late imperial Russia have been categorical in asserting that Russian peasants lacked any form of national identity. Scholars as diverse as Orlando Figes, Geoffrey Hosking, John Keep, Bruce Lincoln, Richard Pipes, Robert Service, Ronald Suny, and Allan Wildman have agreed that Russian peasants were too rooted in Gemeinschaft, too particularistic in their social identities, to be capable of identifying with the polity and territory of Russia. John Keep expresses the consensus concisely when he writes:

The first-person narrative form is notoriously problematic. Throughout the history of the novel, it has both repelled authors due to the obvious limitations imposed by its restriction to a single consciousness and attracted them because of the apparent veracity it imparts to psychological portrayal. In the most conscientiously constructed examples of the type, the first-person narrator is able to portray directly the thoughts of a single character only, that is, himself. Of other characters, he can only report actions and surmise motives, and these characters to whom the reader does not have cognitive privilege may appear to be two-dimensional or even come off as caricatures.

Fedor Dostoevskii's Besy (Demons, 1871-72) is a first-person memoir novel. My thesis is that the novel's narrative form itself involves the reader psychologically and morally in problems that occupied Dostoevskii throughout his life—problems of freedom, contingency, and eternity.

The Georgian state, almost destroyed by two secessionist wars, a civil war, and an economic catastrophe, had by 1997 reestablished an orderly political life. The messianic rhetoric of the early postindependence years was replaced by a new language of civic values and pluralism. The former Soviet nomenklatura—never really ousted by the revolution or subject to lustration laws—had joined old cultural elites, industrial managers, new entrepreneurs, and intellectually minded modernizers in a heterogeneous political class. Though fractious and facing new challenges to its authority from the media, international nongovernmental organizations, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this new political class began to mediate Georgian economic and political life. Society remained fragmented, but structural changes in the economy, the Georgian leadership's restoration of order, and the activities of international nongovernmental organizations, generated embryonic interest groups and indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with claims on government policy. Today, policy conflicts are no longer just the domain of autonomous state structures, but multicornered fights—albeit unequal ones—that extend into Georgian society.

A key moment in the evolution of modern European states was the halfcentury or so that straddles the year 1800. Confronted by commercial and colonial expansion across the seas and the steppes, as well as by the fiscal consequences of two long world wars (1756-63 and 1792-1815), monarchy and ministers increasingly viewed the state as a great engine for mobilizing “economic” resources. This period marks the culmination of what Paul Kennedy calls the European “financial revolution,” which was generated primarily by war. “If the difference between the financial burdens of the age of Philip II and that of Napoleon was one of degree, it still was remarkable enough,” Kennedy observes. The stresses of generating income in such quantities changed individual states as well as the international economy.

In December 1851, Vasilii Vasil'evich Grigor'ev, one of Russia's foremost specialists on the history and languages of Central Asia and the Near East, set off from St. Petersburg to build a new career as an administrator in the turbulent borderlands around the city of Orenburg. Grigor'ev's reasons for leaving Petersburg were both professional and personal. Unable to find an acceptable position in either the educational system or the state bureaucracy, Grigor'ev, formerly a professor at the Richelieu Lycee in Odessa, had subsisted for several years as assistant editor of the journal of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by 1851, with little prospect for advancement, he was willing to look further afield for employment. Grigor'ev's biographer also alludes to personal problems—a painful conflict with a close friend that made his presence in St. Petersburg unpleasant if not unbearable.

In his 1913 guide to the city, Grigorii Moskvich wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessan” was to strike it rich and immediately acquire a house, a carriage, and everything else he needed in order to “transform himself (by appearance, of course) into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the remade Odessan was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés, on the boulevard or in the park,” the Odessan was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.” “Odessans are proud of themselves (not without foundation), flaunting their ability to dress as well as any purebred Parisian or Viennese.” Women, too, were always well turned out, “no husband carrying the expenses of his wife's toilette as uncomplainingly as the Odessan… . This passion for fashion, the desire to impress by external appearances, penetrates all of Odessa society, from the counts to the cooks,” the writer declared.

I was tremendously pleased when I read Steve Smith's thoughtful and erudite comments. Smith's piece is a work of substantial scholarship in its own right, and it nicely complements the discussion articles. I am quite in agreement with most of what Smith has to say, but I do want to respond briefly to the two significant criticisms that Smith makes. The first is that the articles do not sufficiently “attend to the issue of continuity between national identity and earlier forms of politicized ethnicity,” since Seregny and I “implicitly subscribe to the modernist paradigm of nation building.” The second is that the “interplay between nation and empire” and the “relationship between national and class identities” were more conflictual than we allowed.