In the decade between the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, many of the Russian radical intelligentsia believed that Dostoevskii had anticipated their moral dilemmas. Critics, such as D. S. Merezhkovskii, argued that the experience of that turbulent period confirmed Dostoevskii's discovery about the nature of moral choice: Namely, there existed no single system of beliefs, no coherent ethical code, that could resolve all problems of ends and means and that this was so because, on some of the most fundamental issues of moral choice, the promptings of reason and feeling could not be reconciled. To be internally consistent, any ethical systems (and the religious and political creeds that embodied them) must therefore ignore or deny some of the moral imperatives rooted in man's nature. No system of belief, however compelling, could thus confer immunity from guilt, doubt, or self-contempt.

In 1874 a handful of men met in the Ukrainian town of Khar'kov to establish what eventually became the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers. The organization's birth corresponded with that of the great Donbas coal and steel industry, and its story illuminates the exhilaration and the frustration of those who aspired to create an industrial Russia with a liberal face. The association grew prominent over the next forty years, guided by a unique group of men who advocated speedy economic modernization for their country and who embraced such imported liberal visions as private enterprise and individual liberty.

Having crushed the Solidarity movement’s unprecedented attempt to pluralize postwar Polish society, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza or PZPR) ordered a special commission of the party’s Central Committee to study the causes of the political crises that have repeatedly convulsed Poland during forty years of Communist rule and have resulted in the downfall of successive first secretaries and their principal associates. After several months of labor, the commission declared that one of the main causes was that the authorities ignored popular opinion and discouraged local initiatives for independent action and reforms. To show that it had learned its lesson, the PZPR adopted “socialist pluralism” as one of the principal points of its program for “normalization” and “renewal” soon after martial law was lifted in 1982.

Accounts of the Russian peasant movement of 1905-1907 have conventionally stressed its violent and spontaneous character. At least in the core provinces of the Central Agricultural Region, Volga, and parts of the Ukraine, where economic relations between peasants and gentry estates were highly exploitative, land hunger pressing, and the repartitional commune still viable, arson and destruction of estates were the most dramatic forms of agrarian activism. Peasant insurrection would crest in the weeks following promulgation of the tsar's October Manifesto, in some cases as the result of willful misinterpretation of that document, more often as a reaction to news of revolutionary occurrences in the cities and confusion among local authorities.

It is becoming apparent as research sets out the points of contact among Vladimir Nabokov's works that Nabokov deliberately designed his total oeuvre as a spiral that finds ever-widening patterns in the weave of the universe. We are beginning to see how Nabokov combines the passion of natural scientific investigation and the cool distance of literary creation in his art; from reading his commentaries to Pushkin's Eugene Oneginand The Song of Igor's Campaign,we understand how he interprets literary texts through the accumulation of precise detail anchored in fact. Just as the evolution of natural species involves tracing migration and patterns of mimicry, a literary work may be investigated through the evolution of its cultural history.

The subject of gastronomy—as it touches upon the significance of what, how, and why man eats—has begun to receive increasing attention in recent years, during which time quite a number of books on the history of food and drink have appeared. Scholars, moreover, have demonstrated a heightened interest lately in the anthropological aspects of this topic. Since eating is a human activity that by its very nature encompasses a social, a psychological, as well as a biological dimension, the depiction of fictional meals in literature allows this ritualistic event to be transformed into a narrative sign with vast semiotic possibilities—not only within the world of the literary work itself (intratextually) but also within a broader cultural context (extratextually).

As the archetypal young prose writer of the 1960s, Vasilii Aksenov represented the hopes of the Khrushchev generation for the good life and for cultural and political liberalization. Rebelling against the ideological puritanism of socialist realism and the moral imperative of Russian literature, Aksenov’s writing reflected the pleasure principle, hedonism, unofficial popular culture, and the aesthetics of consumption. He perceived life as a multicolored, multinational carnival, which became the backdrop of his heroes’ adolescent identity crises and later problems of mid-life and aging. In response to Stalinism, war, and Soviet ideological bombast, Aksenov and his generation created a literature with a clearly western orientation; experimental, playful, and linguistically subversive, it was optimistic, but not in the socialist realist sense.

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic “empire of knowledge.” It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.

Speaking recently about the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost’ on Russian culture, the exiled Russian scientist Zhores Medvedev expressed skepticism about the artistic benefits of the reforms, comparing them unfavorably to those ushered in by Khrushchev's liberalization: “Whereas Khrushchev's thaw brought many new names and new talents into literature, no new talents have emerged in the past two years.“' Medvedev's statement suggests that he has not been reading Soviet literary journals assiduously. Otherwise he would have noticed the emergence of at least one remarkably talented newcomer on the literary scene—Tat'iana Tolstaia, the most gifted young woman writing fiction in Russia today and arguably the most noteworthy prosaist of the young generation at large.

Early nineteenth century military drafts severely tested the cohesiveness of Russia’s peasant communities. Because a conscript served for twenty-five years, he rarely returned to his community. His household lost a family member, a worker, and often part of its land allotment. The threat of such losses heightened the potential for abuse of community rules determining the selection of conscripts. A serf owner observed this problem when visiting his new estate in 1837: “The draft duties were determined by some sort of calculation, that, in spite of all my desire and mental exercises, I could not master. I only knew that it worked to the profit of the village head and to the loss of the peasants”.

Among the poets of the Third Emigration are a few who were officially recognized and published in the Soviet Union. The vast majority of them, though, hardly published anything in that country; sometimes because they were denied access and more often because they did not seek publication in the Soviet Union, preferring samizdat or publication abroad. Lev Loseff is a unique figure who falls into neither of these categories. He was a professional journalist and writer for children until he left the Soviet Union in 1976, but, although he was a popular figure in Leningrad's unofficial literary life, he was not known to be a poet. In fact, Loseff began as a serious poet in 1974 at an age—thirty-seven—that by any standards is very late and by Russian standards is something like the beginning of the afterlife: It is the age at which Pushkin was killed.

The Soviet military appears to be losing its privileged position within the Soviet national security apparatus. As long as Gorbachev continues to have the upper hand in Moscow, the Kremlin's generals will be in for hard times. Assuming this trend continues, it could have the unexpected effect of enhancing the role of the German Democratic Republic's military contribution to the Warsaw Pact. In turn the East German political leadership's long-term goal of using the military factor to influence Soviet behavior has advanced. The more reliable and more modern its armed forces, the greater the likelihood the East Germans will be able to translate this advantage into leverage—even if it is very limited—in dealing with the Soviets in other areas.

The Revolution of 1905-1907 in Russian-ruled Poland, with its dramatic manifestation of the transformation of the country’s political culture, marks a major, if not entirely appreciated, watershed in modern Polish history. Influenced, if not sparked by events in the central provinces of the Russian Empire, most notably Bloody Sunday, the revolution in Russian Poland quickly acquired a momentum of its own based on local conditions. In Poland the revolution was characterized by several nationwide general strikes and the sudden emergence of a viable labor movement; by a long, bitter, and partially successful boycott of the Russified school system; by unprecedented popular striving for the benefits of secular culture and education; by the gmina (communal) movement in the countryside that aroused a large part of the Polish peasantry from its traditional indifference to national issues; and by the rapid growth of political and social organizations that claimed to represent the interests of mass constituencies. Preceded by four decades of fundamental demographic, economic, and social change, the revolution propelled the largest and most significant part of Poland into a new era of broad, popular participation in the political, social, and cultural life of the country.

From the 1950s to the 1970s the views of sex roles in general and of childbearing in particular that were held by women in the United States changed considerably. Some evidence also indicates modest changes in ideas about sex roles occurred in the Soviet Union over these decades, but there is less reason to expect that similar changes took place in attitudes specifically towards childbearing. This article explores areas of stability and change between these two decades in Soviet women's emotional responses to pregnancy, childbirth, and newborn care and their sources of advice and support during the transition to motherhood. Similarities and differences between two cohorts, one composed of women who gave birth in the 1950s and one composed of women who gave birth in the 1970s, are discussed in terms of the prevailing family ideologies and social and economic conditions of the two decades.

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

The beginning of the twentieth century brought new outlooks and aspirations into the cultural life of Serbia, but the mainstream of spiritual and creative development had already been marked by the affirmation of established national values. After 1903 important political changes, accompanying the return of constitutional government, stimulated a spiritual and national revival. In his History of the New Serbian Literature, Jovan Skerlić described the general improvement in social and political life. Skerlić, a contemporary who actively participated in the cultural and political events at the beginning of this century, pointed out that the consequences of these changes influenced the awakening of the national spirit and offered numerous solutions to questions of national importance. In 1904 Skerlić took part in the organization of the First Congress of Southern Slav Youth and of the First Yugoslav Fine Arts Exhibit marking the centennial of the first Serbian uprising. These events strengthened friendly cultural collaboration between Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bulgarians. Even the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 could not halt this growth. Further proof of national strength was furnished by the victories in the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. After five hundred years the liberation of the Serbian people from Turkish occupation was finally accomplished.