To Gleb Uspenskii's contemporaries, his preference for short forms like sketches, notes, and fragments masked an artistic fl aw – his inability to produce a novel. The paper reconsiders Uspenskii's generic choices as a deliberate critique of the novel form. This critique refl ected Uspenskii's anxiety about the signifi cance of individual personality and experience overvalued by the novel. Uspenskii's aspiration to transcend the novel's preoccupation with an individual human fate in order to lay bare the conditions shaping the shared destiny of all led him to exchange the novel's “microscopic” optics for a broader, panoramic lens. Such change in perspective dictated several other elements of his poetics: from rejecting the novel's aesthetics of small detail to reconfi guring the traditional character structure.

In the continuing debate among Western students of Soviet affairs about the direction in which the Soviet political system is moving, all participants agree that accurate analysis is imperative. How one interprets the evidence of change determines one's view of current Soviet reality and one's perception of the opportunities and threats involved in U.S.-Soviet relations. This crucial issue is addressed in the following pages by examining the current situation of an important, evolving institution, the USSR People's Control Committee (Komitet narodnogo kontrolia, or KNK). To a remarkable degree this organization, in its twelfth year of existence, demonstrates the continuing process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet polity.

Prior to his influential seminars on G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the 1930s, the philosopher Alexandre Kojève was still Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, a recent émigré to Germany who studied the philosophy of Vladimir Solov΄ev in Heidelberg. As a result, Kojève published several articles in French and German on Solov΄ev's philosophy of history and divine Sophia. While he soon developed his own reputation as a celebrated philosopher, posthumously published works such as Atheism (1931) and the forthcoming publication of a manuscript written in 1940 and devoted once more to “Sophia,” suggest that his engagement with Russian religious philosophy was more protracted than previously considered. This article outlines the uniqueness of Kojève's interpretation of Sophia, from his initial interest in Solov΄ev's philosophy, through to his secularization of the concept in Atheism, and ultimately his “return” to Russian philosophy, when he writes a treatise on Sophia in Russian to be sent to Stalin himself.

This essay explores the unique challenge the proliferation of adjunct labor in higher education poses to efforts at eliminating racial bias and promoting diversity in our field. Relying on published research and personal experience, I argue that the pervasive exploitation of contingent labor makes academic careers, particularly in far-flung fields such as Slavic studies, unattractive to many college graduates from the Black community, a large portion of which considers education a meritocratic means of escaping intergenerational poverty. Because the economic, social, and cultural inequalities at play in determining who obtains a tenure-track job fly in the face of this myth of meritocracy so fundamental to historic Black hopes for socioeconomic mobility, I call for a reckoning with adjunctification as a critical first step to addressing racial bias and ensuring inclusivity in our field.

Anthropogenic climate change necessitates rethinking the role of academic scholarship. This article addresses the question of Soviet subjecthoods from the perspective of one's affective connection to natural environments, while keeping in mind the multiscalarity of subjecthood. It traces a genealogy of environmentally-attuned selfhoods in the late Soviet-era sociocultural imagination and positions this model within the context of present-day understandings of subjecthood in Soviet studies. Soviet-era subjects did not make sense of their lives, aims and accomplishments solely in relation to the Soviet state, but also in relation to things closer at hand and in relation to ideas and conditions of a global and planetary scale. In Alberts Bels's and Jaan Kaplinski's writings, the environmentally conscious subject emerges as multiscalar: a subject who identifies both with its direct, affectively experienced environment, but who also realizes the boundedness of local, global, and planetary processes. The ethical attitude of reverence for life, promoted by Albert Schweitzer, together with the widely shared concern about both local-level environmental damage and the future of the planet provide the context for late Soviet multiscalar naturecultural subjecthood.

Late in October 1918, in the shadow of impending defeat, nationalist revolutions rocked the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time the Austro-Hungarian representatives signed the Padua Armistice on November 3, imperial authority no longer existed in the Dual Monarchy. In Hungary the revolution of October 30 brought to power a coalition government led by the liberal pacifist, Mihaly Karolyi. The coalition included the Karolyi-led Independence Party, the Social Democrats, and the Radicals of Oszkar Jaszi. This revolutionary government's aim was to liquidate the semifeudal remnants of the old order by introducing democratic, political, and social reforms.

By most accounts, the Russian Revolution began on February 23, 1917 with the women's strike for bread and suffrage. Yet for the next thirteen years (until 1930), that revolutionary beginning was celebrated on March 12, after which it was expunged from the revolutionary calendar altogether. “International Women's Day” meanwhile became March 8 because of the change in the Russian calendar in 1918 (it had been 13 days behind the European calendar), and February 23 became “Red Army Day” and subsequently (in 2006), “Day of the Defender of the Fatherland.” Over the course of the early 1920s, the connection between the women's strike on February 23/March 8 and the February Revolution was actively undermined in several ways. First, the February Revolution itself was dated not from the moment when women marched in the streets of Petrograd calling out the men to strike, but rather from March 12 (February 27), which was the day of the founding of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, soon to become the Provisional Government. Second, the celebration of the two holidays of Red Army Day on February 23 and International Women's Day on March 8 created a split between men and women in their celebrations, separating them and assigning spheres to each, the army for men and the home for women. Finally, the creation of February 23 as the anniversary of the Red Army's founding seems to have deliberately upstaged both women's involvement in the 1917 Revolution and the overthrow of autocracy.

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.