By giving us a horse's perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi's Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author's use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies diat examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration— with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author's part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.

Politically, the phrase “Polish October” refers to the installation of a new government in October 1956, along with the hopes this event inspired for a more liberalized regime. In cultural terms, however, the Polish October is analogous to the “Thaw” in the Soviet Union—but much warmer—and it includes a period of about two or three years, roughly from 1955 to 1958, during which intense debate, settling of accounts, and a reevaluation of tradition took place. Socialist Realism was discredited once and for all, and a burst of new publishing occurred. Drawers were emptied of manuscripts by already established writers as well as by those who were making belated debuts, while postwar West European literature appeared in translation. In addition, many forgotten or forbidden works of Polish interwar literature were reissued, and a selective program of publishing emigre works in Poland was initiated.

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) has been hailed by followers in many countries as a forerunner of symbolism, if not as the father of modern poetry tout court. In Russia, Andrei Belyi celebrated him together with Nietzsche in 1909 as a "Patriarkh Simvolizma"; and Valerii Briusov wrote in the same year: "Is it possible to question the importance of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal for the formation of the whole worldview of modernity?" Ellis (L.L. Kobylinskii), the most zealous of all Russian symbolist "Baudelaireans," even tried to convince the menshevik social democrat, N. Valentinov, that Baudelaire was "the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison with whom all Marxes, Engelses, Bakunins, and the rest of the brotherhood which they created, are simply nothing."

In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place." Freidin's richly suggestive remark hints at both the nature of and the reasons for Mandel'shtam's "orphandom," and the means by which he sought to surmount or circumvent his pervasive homelessness and achieve a "homeland, a house, a hearth" in culture.

The Arts of Bulgaria since World War II are of considerable interest for the history of art largely because they so directly demonstrate what happens to the arts of a previously non-Communist country under Soviet dominance. Since the Communist take-over, not only has Bulgarian art directly reflected the Soviet political line but it has done this even more thoroughly than the art of the Soviet Union itself. For beautiful Bulgaria is such a compact and homogeneous little country—about 325 miles long and 215 miles wide, with a population of only 8 million people, about 90 percent of whom are of specifically Bulgarian stock—that its Communist government can control the arts with far greater ease than can the regime of so enormous and racially diversified a nation as the Soviet Union. Even long before World War II, Slavic Bulgaria had closer cultural links with Slavic Russia than did any of the other countries that fell under Soviet political domination as a consequence of the war. As might therefore have been expected, its arts have reflected the influence of the Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”—and the distinct but related and highly relevant Stalinist formula of an art “national in form and socialist in content”—more directly than have those of the other “satellites.”

Since the collapse of communism, much scholarship has examined the efforts by the countries of east central Europe and the former Soviet Union to develop democratic regimes. The majority of such studies have focused on institutional development and the problems of democratic transition at the national level. Although this focus is not at all surprising given the highly centralized political structures that have been the legacy of the communist past, the efficacy, indeed the ultimate success or failure of democratization, may well rest largely on the ability of local government to satisfy citizen demands. Local government is most directly involved in delivering the goods and services that affect people’s daily lives. Hence, citizens often form their judgments of political systems based on the performance of local government. To the degree that democracy depends on the loyalty of the citizenry, local government is important to the survival of democracy.

Who rules is the central question posed by scholars studying local government. This issue lies at the heart of democracy. While it is nowhere the case that citizens rule directly, in a democracy their preferences must have some effect on public policy.