In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic “dialects”: Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs’ neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: “When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue.”

In Langston Hughes's 1934 essay “Boy Dancers of Uzbekistan,” (published in Travel magazine), the author writes mournfully about the Soviet reforms that put an end to the practice of effeminized male dancers, bachi, performing in the teahouses of Central Asia for exclusively male audiences; in doing so, Hughes expresses an enthusiasm for the queer contours of the bachi tradition. This article connects that enthusiasm with Hughes's earlier involvement in cultural efforts aimed at increasing queer visibility within the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. By situating “Boy Dancers” in this context, the underexplored role of the Russian Revolution in fostering queer solidarity among global communities of color is highlighted.

Compared to Lenin or Plekhanov or Martov, Vera Zasulich is a relatively minor figure in the Russian Revolutionary pantheon. She is remembered more for shooting Trepov in 1878 than for anything else she accomplished in her lifetime. Vera Zasulich created no party, conceived no doctrine, established no personal following. Her political thought is not without originality or interest, however, and an examination of her ideas reveals how radical dogma equating poverty and virtue was able to fascinate Russian intelligenty possessed by an altruism which demanded that the affluent and educated help redistribute the material and intellectual resources of society. Teaching illiterate workers the rudiments of education in the 1860s, preaching revolution among the peasants of southern Russia in the 1870s, and disseminating Marxist theory in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s helped assuage the guilt Zasulich had accumulated as a woman of education and refinement.

Biography would seem to be firmer ground than literary criticism: at least we like to think that biography has a factual basis in the writer's life. But of course, when we deal with biography, our sources turn out to be yet more texts (memoirs, diaries, letters, and the like), and for this reason we often discover that the documentary evidence for the writer's life is less than objective and in fact displays its own biases and is governed by its own conventions of representation.