The first train line connecting St. Petersburg with western Europe opened in 1862, providing the occasion for Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Leskov to take positions in regard to train travel, cultural traffic, and Russia's insertion into modernity. Anne Dwyer's analysis of Dostoevskii's WinterNotes on Summer Impressionsand Leskov's “From a Travel Diary” reveals an essential paradox. While Leskov is eager to foster the railroad, he switches hats with ease and offers pragmatic performances of an imperial identity based on his competency in the languages of the borderlands. In contrast, the nationalist Dostoevskii fulminates against train travel yet explores the ways in which modernity's onset changes human experience and literary possibilities. Their bifurcated yet equally ambivalent responses to modernity as emblematized by the railroad illuminate the diversity of attempts to articulate a Russian identity in relationship both to Russia's own people(s) and to western Europe in the modern age.

Although the study of Ukrainian historiography is rather new, it can boast of three distinguished names: Dmytro Doroshenko, Oleksander Ohloblyn, and M. I. Marchenko. To Doroshenko goes credit for the first work on Ukrainian historical writing ever published. His study, the only comprehensive survey, covers the period from the eleventh century to 1920. Doroshenko's book was supplemented and updated to 1956 by another Ukrainian historian, Ohloblyn

Six years ago Professor E. Keenan wrote a major study, refuting the authenticity of the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii. Keenan's book attracted great attention. In 1973 the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkinskii Dom) published my book Correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and Kurbskii: Paradoxes of Edward Keenan. In the course of the discussion generated by the publication of Keenan's book, scholars of the most varied schools and tendencies have expressed their reaction to the subject of the controversy. Between 1972 and 1975 a series of articles summarizing the controversy were published, and the matter was thoroughly discussed. Edward Keenan's paradoxes have not received support among the scholarly community. Keenan's idea that, in view of the spuriousness of nearly all the writings of Ivan IV and several other significant compositions of that time, the history of Russia in the sixteenth century needed to be written anew might have served as a stimulus to an all-embracing discussion of a broad range of problems. In the absence of any serious proof of the fabrication, however, such a discussion did not take place. A number of works of Ivan IV and Kurbskii have been preserved to the present in copies indisputably compiled in the sixteenth century, and the controversy as to whether the persons in question were the writers goes by default.

This article explores Aleksandr Herzen's use of the lovesickness topos in his novel Kto vinovat? (1847) in the context of the long literary and medical traditions of lovesickness and the specifically Russian situation of the 1840s. Valeria Sobol argues that Herzen was among the first Russian writers to exploit the semiotics and diagnostics of lovesickness in order to address the questions of human spirituality and the status of scientific knowledge. Given Herzen's frequentiy proclaimed antispiritualist and antidualist position and the novel's apparent anti-Romantic pathos, one would expect him to reject the essentially dualist notion of lovesickness as a “malady of the soul,” but the novel presents a far more complex picture. Herzen's struggle to reconcile the new scientific spirit of his age with the Romantic heritage reflects the transitional nature of the decade in which the novel was written.

This article analyzes the role of Russia's changing readership and incipient print culture in Dead Souls. Though Nikolai Gogol' was received in salon society, his primary allegiance was to print and the broad (and thus unsophisticated) readership that was beginning to buy and read printed texts. Like other of Gogol“s works (“On the Development of Periodical Literature in 1834 and 1835,” “The Portrait”), Dead Souls reflects the author's awareness of the severe limitations of this audience, especially their desire for conventional plot devices and their eagerness for characters with whom to identify. Although Dead Souls invites readers' participation, it also reflects Gogol“s growing skepticism about inexperienced readers' attempts to create meaning, his disdain for their judgment, and his desire to assert total control over the meaning of his art. Lounsbery considers Dead Souls' reception and situates Gogol“s work in the context of the appearance of Library for Reading in 1834 and other writers' approaches to the problem of Russia's reading public (notably Faddei Bulgarin and Osip Senkovskii).

While many studies of the early Soviet theater have focused upon its proletarian or revolutionary stages, in the polemics of that era a central topic of dispute was the so-called academic stage. The academic theaters of Moscow and Petrograd, which included the former imperial theaters as well as select representatives of the pre-revolutionary private stage, most notably the Arts and Kamernyi theaters, had no lack of critics or enemies in the years after October. The former court theaters were attacked as politically dangerous relics of the old regime, their artists were envied for their material privileges and status, their large budgets were coveted by less generously funded workers' and avant-garde stages, their art was condemned as conservative and out of harmony with the revolution and socialism. For Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii, however, these theaters were academies which would both preserve the best of the pre-revolutionary cultural heritage and provide standards of technical excellence against which more innovative theaters could be measured.

On August 6, 1919, a bloodless coup d'état occurred in Budapest, forcing the Socialist “trade union” government to resign, and bringing Hungary’s radical phase to an abrupt end. Hungary’s revolutionary experiments had been resounding failures, and the majority of the population was relieved. The first revolution of October 31, 1918 had promised democracy, independence, and unimpaired territorial integrity but had brought instead only disappointments— political instability and foreign occupation. The second revolution, which declared Hungary a Soviet republic on March 21, 1919, was no more successful than the first. The proletarian dictatorship, originally welcomed as a remedy for the discredited democratic institutions, rapidly lost its appeal, and the world revolution, initially held out as an answer to Hungary’s territorial mutilation, failed to become a reality. By the end of July, the Rumanian army was at the gates of Budapest and internal dissatisfaction had assumed threatening proportions.

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.

While The Impact of the Bolshevik Revolution upon international socialism has attracted considerable attention, the international impact of the revolution of March, 1917, has largely been ignored. It is the purpose of this paper to survey the effects of the March revolution upon one important segment of the Socialist International, the German, and particularly to describe the efforts of the German majority socialists to achieve a separate peace between their Government and the Provisional Government in Russia.