Addressing what he sees as serious disjunctures in characterization and narrative technique, Joseph Frank has called Idiot “the most disorganized,” of Fedor Dostoevskii’s major works. The first part of the novel so differs from the last three parts, Frank holds, that it may “best be read as an independent novella.” Although, undoubtedly, many subtle structural, thematic, and rhetorical elements tie the novel together, Idiot does seem at times to generate as much centrifugal as centripetal force. Tackling this issue head on, Robin Feuer Miller, with judicious use of reader-response theory, succeeds in imposing some order on the narrational disjunctures of the text, setting up a hierarchy of narrators and narrative personae. More problematic, however, is the question of point of view in the larger sense. In the Bakhtinian sense, point of view manifests itself in the relation between the different narrators of the novel as the autonomous voices of the characters and the narrator enter into an unfinished dialogue. The broader use of the term concerns the novel’s worldviews, or master plots, which variously govern and structure the presentation of character, story, and metaphor.

Architectonics designates those compositional principles that define a novel's structural and thematic coherence. The Greek term arkhitektonike, as glossed by Sir Philip Sidney in The Defense of Poesy, has the additional merit of offering a useful shorthand for my eclectic approach to Vasilii Grossman's novel: a pre-Saussurean concern for referent, parole, and authorial intent, combined with a structuralist focus on design and pattern–a search for the binary oppositions and governing motifs that make the work an integrated linguistic construct. I argue that Zhizn' i sud'ba requires such an approach and that only through coming to grips with the novel's architectonics shall we understand its meaning and appreciate its artistic energy.

Utopia and dystopia designate the human dream of happiness and the human nightmare of despair when these are assigned a place (topos) in space or time. Since narrative literature "is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery," Utopian and dystopian inventions are mere extremes of literature's ongoing story. In realistic fictions, although social circumstances may range from the incidental to the decisive, the story of the movement to happiness or unhappiness is usually told in terms of individual achievement and failure. In the Utopian and anti-utopian scheme deliverance or damnation depend on the place where one has found oneself, whether it is "the good place" or "the bad place." Although Utopias are allegorical constructs of the rational mind, attempting to bring order to the disorder of life, their denial of what is for the sake of what ought to be makes them a species of fantasy literature–a dream of reason.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Mikhail Bulgakov's Master i Margarita is the complex and deeply significant system of parallels the author has set up between the Moscow and Jerusalem stories. These parallels have produced, in much scholarly analysis of the novel, a strong tendency toward what Andrew Barratt has called a “monistic” approach: An interpretation of the work as a double novel, or two variations of the same “master story,” acted out in different times and places by characters with clear, specific correlations—Woland-Pilate (or Latunskii-Pilate), the Master-Ieshua, Bezdomnyi-Matvei, and so forth. Although this approach has an obvious appeal, it also has several serious weaknesses. Not least among these is its failure to encompass the character of Margarita—that is, to identify a parallel to her in the Jerusalem story. In the following I will address this weakness by suggesting that Margarita's parallel character is Afranius, the chief of Pilate's secret service.

Glasnost has made available to scholars many of the postwar files of the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs. These files, covering the activities between World War II and 1966 of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs and the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, have been deposited in the Central Governmental Archives in Moscow. Five thin volumes of indexes refer to thousands of pages of material, including signed original documents, initialed carbons, and reports from individual inspectors and district commissioners. The materials appear to be genuine, even though they are not complete.

The problem of abolishing serfdom preoccupied Russian social thinkers long before the Emancipation in 1861. In spite of more than a century of scholarship devoted to analyzing the peasant question, however, historians have reached no consensus on such fundamental issues as the origins and political implications of abolitionist thought. Did advocacy of peasant emancipation by members of the landed nobility spring from liberal altruism or from a selfish desire to defend seigneurial interests against revolutionary peasants and the peasants’ spokesmen, the so-called “revolutionary democrats”? Can Slavophilism and westernism be classified simply as varieties of liberalism, which, whatever their minor differences, agreed on the necessity of avoiding peasant revolution and regarded Russian radicals as pernicious enemies? Before emancipation were Russian liberals sharply differentiated ideologically from more radical intellectuals, such as Aleksandr I. Herzen and Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii—a differentiation traceable to attitudes toward the peasant emancipation? Or did the definitive split between liberalism and radicalism come after the Emancipation? Scholars bring to these questions such disparate conceptions of Russian politics and of the nature of historical proof that achieving consensus may be impossible. Nevertheless, the Soviet historian Vera F. Zakharina has argued convincingly that certain facets of the larger questions can be illuminated by investigating the ideological assumptions in the letters and programmatic works of major social thinkers and especially by observing how these assumptions changed over time.

Since the beginning of Soviet power, national leaders have been concerned with controlling the diverse regions that make up the Soviet Union. They have used many means, including coercion, to extend their influence over the localities. Lower-level party officials, especially regional first secretaries, have been crucial links between the national regime and the periphery. These officials juggle a complex set of political and economic responsibilities and must safeguard a region's political stability, while applying national directives. They oversee the economic life of their bailiwick and attempt to enhance its productivity. Recruiting and elevating these lower-level officials is critical to maintaining national influence in the regions; the 1988-1990 political reforms have not changed this method.

Poslanie mnogoslovnoe, an example of Muscovite antiheretical polemics, can be analyzed to add to our substantive knowledge of pre-Petrine Russian history and perhaps to refine our methodological tools for a critical evaluation of the sources for this period. Poslanie has long been regarded as a principal source of information about the life and ideas of its presumed author, the midsixteenth century Novgorodian monk Zinovii Otenskii, whose accomplishments as a theologian and publicist of the medieval Russian Orthodox church have traditionally been ranked only behind those of Iosif Volotskii and Maksim Grek. In conjunction with Zinovii's Istiny pokazanie, Poslanie provides our only detailed exposition of the teachings of the runaway slave Feodosii Kosoi, whose alleged criticisms of state and church constitute the most extreme rejection of the established order articulated in medieval Muscovy. In addition to its value for the interpretive study of Russian religious and intellectual history, Poslanie presents us with a methodological problem typical of early Russian documents: The work is anonymous and undated, and basic questions about its authorship, time of composition, and provenance have not been satisfactorily answered. The lack of information on either Zinovii or Kosoi and the contradictions in the pictures of both Zinovii and his heretical opponents presented in Poslanie, Istiny, and other, less detailed works, attributed to the monk, make solving these problems all the more interesting

Aleksei Kruchenykh's "Razboinik Van'ka-Kain i Son'ka-manikiurshchitsa" is the first in a cycle of four "crime novels" in verse published by the poet during the heyday of his involvement in postrevolutionary futurist politics. Unlike much of the ephemera he wrote during the 1910s, this particular poem was produced and promoted with unusual care. It first appeared in the sixth, penultimate, issue of Vladimir Maiakovskii's LEF.

Liberalized cultural discussion in the Soviet Union after the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1985 was concerned in part with the nature of a literature that would be appropriate to the new ideals of openness and restructuring. In Ukraine, as elsewhere, the debate brought forth a list of imperatives that, without challenging the socialist realist principle that literature must serve overarching social and political goals, amounted to a formula for a new kind of literary engagement. Literature must “boldly intrude into contemporary reality,” it must defend the historical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological heritage and must unmask the crimes and abuses of the past and present. It must no longer be bland and inoffensive and must not avoid controversial issues or praise the status quo as a matter of course.

Ol'ga Mikhailovna Freidenberg (1890-1955) has recently emerged from oblivion in the Soviet Union and in the west. In the Soviet Union, she has gained renown for the extraordinary diversity of her scholarly interests, from classical philology to a broad range of topics in theoretical poetics. In the west she is now known for her correspondence with her cousin, Boris Pasternak, and as the author of voluminous memoir notes, Probeg zhizni. The epistolary part of Freidenberg's archive was published in Russian and in English by Elliott Mossman in The Correspondence of Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg: 1910-1954.

Conversations with recent immigrants from the Soviet Union' often revolve around the theme of druzhba. In Israel and America alike, Russian-Jewish newcomers wistfully and passionately describe their old circles of friends as involved in absorbing conversations about literature, cinema, and news from abroad. As they reminisce, Soviet Jewish immigrants break into smiles and relate the political jokes and critical anecdotes they heard and told in these circles. They tell too of friends pooling scarce resources to help each other purchase a car, an apartment or summer home, a once-in-a-lifetime find on the black market, or, simply, food. Happily they remember birthday and New Year's parties that just seemed to have happened; they describe festive singing and dancing in joyful gatherings that were never formal or prearranged.

Social historians have argued for three decades that the Russian Revolution was preeminently a workers’ revolution. Leopold Haimson was the first to propose, in an influential 1964 article, that workers themselves, and not, as the prevailing wisdom then held, Lenin and the Bolshevik party, prepared the way for the October Revolution. In this article, however, I will argue that in some instances ideological institutions had shaped the workers’ expectations.

All literature can be understood as text; it can be interpreted, but not all literature asks to be. Text describes a literary work as it moves within and between cultures; it implies interpretation and the readers’ active participation. To use the term text is to make assumptions that are not universal. While literature can bridge the many cultures that create and read it, it can also be confined to a specific frame within its own culture. It can resist bridging, just as it resists independent interpretation. Literature as performance, as an example, is intended for one time and one place. Performance looks at the literary work inside its intended environment. The meaning of the work is predicated by the occasion and conventions of its reading; the audience is asked not to insinuate its own interpretation but to participate in the one provided. Performance can be a physical realization of text in time and space; and, even when an actual performance does not take place, the term suggests an important way of reading.

Stalin's death and Nikita Krushchev's unsuccessful attempt at de-Stalinization significantly eroded official Marxist-Leninist ideology in the Soviet Union. Searching for a new alternative to the fading Communist ideology, many Russians turned toward traditional Russian forms of national and religious identity.