In this article, Konstantine Klioutchkine explores Nikolai Nekrasov's model of personality as it emerged at the intersection of his poetry, his public life, and his contemporaries’ accounts about him. The fascination with Nekrasov stemmed not so much from the veneration of his civic achievements as from the curiosity about his profligate lifestyle and glamorous ethical failures. Exemplary tensions within Nekrasov's lyric and public personae enabled his contemporaries to negotiate between the recognition of progressive values, the pursuit of unsanctioned pleasures, and the experience of moral infirmity. Discussions of Nekrasov's inherently contradictory personality suggested that, for members of the intelligentsia who came of age between the 1850s and 1880s, his personality symbolized what they had already sensed about the nature of their own selves but could not admit until later decades.

In this article, Joanna Niżyńska explores the modes used by poets of the bruLion generation (whose debuts coincided with the end of communism) to import Frank O'Hara's poetics into Polish literature and the significance of their doing so. By employing Harold Bloom's concepts of the “anxiety of influence,” “kenosis,” and “daemonization,” Niżyńska analyzes the intergenerational impulses manifested in O'Harism in relation to the Romantic paradigm in Poland's poetic tradition. Niżyńska claims that in turning to O'Hara, such poets as Marcin Świetlicki, Jacek Podsiadło, and Miłosz Biedrzycki engaged in dialectically related modes of revisionary reading of both domestic and foreign traditions. O'Harism is interpreted as a sign of a multifaceted cultural morphogenesis that was simultaneously an act of compensation for Romantic “Polish complexes,” a self-exploration of a new poetic generation in the face of a new political and cultural reality, and a misreading of a foreign source.

In the 1950s the Soviet school system stabilized and teachers incorporated non-Russian national histories into the elementary curriculum. Shoshana Keller argues that in Soviet Uzbekistan teachers defined Uzbek nationhood partly through historical narrative, which told children that the Uzbek people had existed continuously from ancient times but the nation achieved independence only under Russian/Soviet leadership. Children learned that for millennia Uzbek hero/martyrs had fought losing batdes against foreign invaders. The best Uzbeks were from the lower classes, but the nation had also produced high culture. Above all, children were taught to imagine themselves, not within Eurasian Islamic historical time, but within European historical time as envisioned by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Iosif Stalin. What children learned about Uzbek history in school was central to the formation of a personal sense of national identity and to the larger Soviet project of nation building.

In this article, Emma Lieber situates “The Execution of Tropmann,” a late essay by Ivan Turgenev, as a key work in the author's oeuvre. Since the essay's publication, readers from Fedor Dostoevskii to contemporary critics have focused on the scene of the public execution—in which the narrator, one of a crowd of spectators, averts his gaze—as a signal instance of the reserve, moderation, and civilized refinement that are the cornerstone of the author's poetics. Lieber argues that this scene must be understood in the context of the essay as a whole, which she reads as an expression of anxiety about, and a troubled subversion of, the very civilizing influences that have been read as redemptive in Turgenev's novels and short stories. This interpretation therefore urges, not only a reconsideration of the place of “Tropmann” and its central scene in Turgenev's work, but also a reassessment of the tenor of the author's fiction.

In this article, Kate Holland examines the significance of Christian legend in The Brothers Karamazov. Arguing that the novel's main creative mission was the reincorporation of religious experience into the novelistic form, Holland explores how Fedor Dostoevskii integrates the worldviews of hagiography, apocrypha, and folk legend into the novel through the generic identities of the Karamazov brothers. Similarities and differences on die level of character are expressed in the conflict between genres, leading to an examination of the novel's own generic assumptions, and a genre memory of its roots within medieval religious and vernacular works. Holland locates this interest within the critical and theoretical debates on the nature of the novel taking place in Russian academic and critical circles as Dostoevskii was writing the novel. The heterogeneous nature of the religious worldviews modeled by Dostoevskii subverts the conventional view of the novel as an expression of Orthodoxy and constitutes a radical experiment in novelistic form.

In this article, Kristin Roth-Ey explores the complex and often convoluted reception of television technology in the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s. Television held out the potential to fulfill the long-standing dream of a universal Soviet culture—propaganda, art, and science delivered directly to every home—and it offered a compelling symbol of a modern Soviet “way of life” in a Cold War context as well. Soviet consumers and technological enthusiasts embraced the new medium with gusto and played an important role in its promotion. As Roth-Ey elucidates, however, the nature of television production and consumption—and, in particular, the Soviets’ decision to promote a home-based broadcasting system—put television in implicit conflict with important Soviet traditions, ideals, and, at times, interest groups. The development of the mature form of centralized Soviet television symbolized by Moscow's Ostankino complex is the story of how political and cultural elites, consumers, and the Soviet system in an abstract sense struggled to make a “home” for television technology in the USSR.

The national heroes of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania that emerged in literary culture during the nineteenth century were warrior heroes. In the twentieth century, a series of interpretations and adaptations by leading authors disarmed and desacralized Kalevipoeg, Bearslayer (Lāčplēsis), and King Mindaugas, tempering or rejecting their violent actions and recasting these central allegories of national myth into a nonviolent mold. These heroes are part of the cultural context in which the nonviolent Baltic “Singing Revolution” emerged; they offer an intriguing example of evolving (or devolving) aggressive drives and the civilizing process in the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian national cultures.

This article examines the imperial Russian army's attempt to formulate a comprehensive nationalities policy for its officer corps after 1905. The army sought to establish service quotas for each nationality according to its percentage of the empire's population. The professed goal of this policy was the preservation of the numerical, and thus cultural, predominance of Orthodox, ethnic Russian officers. Yet this attempt to fashion an officer corps both “imperial” and “Russian” exposed competing paradigms of service, loyalty, and identity among tsarist officers, raising broader questions about the relationship between army, state, and empire. Thus concerns of nationality and nationalism affected the officer corps more deeply than has been assumed. Gregory Vitarbo's work provides new insights into the intersection of military reform, nationality policy, and imperial ideology in the late Russian empire, while further illustrating suggestive linkages with contemporary pan-European trends concerning military practices, nationality politics, and cultural ferment.

Exploiting what Jean Starobinski has called the “solar myth” of the revolution, the Soviet regime used the visual power of light within glass to create an exalted vision of Russia's transformation. This article explores the symbolism and the spectacular use of the light bulb (as a material and a discursive entity) in the early Soviet period. Julia Bekman Chadaga traces how the light bulb became an ideological icon and then investigates its treatment in Soviet popular culture and in literary works by Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Iurii Olesha. The Kremlin stars are examined as a monumental manifestation of the Soviet light bulb and a case study illustrating the state's appropriation of religious imagery. While official discourse around the Kremlin stars and “Lenin's little lamps” invokes the conquest of unruly nature and the attainment of divine power via technology produced by the triumphant socialist state, the literary works examined here destabilize the fixed symbolic meaning of captive light.

Among Vladimír Holan's postwar poetic output, the cycle Rudoarmĕjci (Red army soldiers, 1947) enjoys high critical acclaim while the trio of his other works, Dík Sovĕtskému svazu (Thanks to the Soviet Union), Panychida (A memorial service), and the cycle Tobé (To you), is regarded as a crude exercise in propaganda. Peter Steiner argues that the main reason for this evaluative difference is that the genre of the cycle enables Holan to disseminate an ideological message similar to that of the unappreciated trio in a more subtle, less ostentatious manner. The first part of the article analyzes the various techniques of portraiture Holan employed to represent ordinary Russian soldiers (prosopopeia and ethopoeia). In the second part, Steiner discusses the genre's ideological potential. Since portrait by definition must depict an actual human subject, the very selection of the model and his or her features embroils such a work in a specific social reality and reflects the author's attitude toward it. This worldview, however, is not added to the text mechanically, from without, but comprises an integral part of the very mimetic apparatus that generates its overall meaning.

The report of the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, issued in December 2006, is the most serious attempt to understand Romania's communist experience ever produced. Coordinated by the American political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, the report covers virtually every aspect of communism as a lived system, from the installation of Communist Party officials during the postwar occupation, through the instruments of coercion, to the fate of religious institutions, the economy, national minorities, and education. The release of the report also contributed to a major political crisis, during which the parliament attempted to unseat the president, Traian Basescu, who had lauded the report and officially condemned communism as an illegitimate system. The question now is whether the commission's report will be used as yet another opportunity to reject history or as a way of helping Romanians learn, at last, how to own it.