Although, before the First World War, Slavic affairs received but little attention in the United States, libraries were in this respect somewhat ahead of the times and started building their collections at a relatively early juncture. It is true that in 1901 Herbert Putnam, then Librarian of Congress, found that the Library proper could count only 569 Russian and 97 Polish books among its own holdings. The Russian collection, he commented, “has few of the original authorities, and is weak in modern descriptive works. On the history of Russia and on the Crimean War [there are] only a few of the principal authorities.” Yet pursuant to an act of Congress passed in 1866, the Library held in deposit, though not in ownership, a more substantial if not very appreciable set of publications which had been received by the Smithsonian Institution in exchange for materials supplied to learned institutions in East and East Central Europe.

Barrels roll. In a mythological, folk, or literary text, they set off a reciprocal dynamic of emptying out and filling in. Where Diogenes filled his barrel with his own cynical self, Francois Rabelais removed him, then poured back in the wine drained off to accommodate his asceticism. On the basis of this example, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates the need to re-embody the disembodied; in connection with the folk laughter that replenishes the hollow chill of mortality, he notes that Rabelais celebrated the “cheerful death” of the Duke of Clarence in a barrel full of malmsey. In Vladimir Propp’s analysis of myth, folktales, and initiation rites, barrels stand in for the bellies of great fish; these swallow and then regurgitate the hero, supplying in the interim “temporary death,” mystic instruction, and the makings of a leader or a savior of the people. It is in an ocean-going barrel that Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon, condemned to an infant death, grows “not by days, but by hours” (“Skazka o tsare Saltane” [Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831]), repeating the pattern of reversals in birth dreams, through exposure on the water and entombment in womb-like receptacles, studied by Otto Rank. Il'ia Erenburg’s apostle of absolute and universal negation had planned to start his mission by crossing the Atlantic in a beer barrel (Julio Jurenito, 1922). The dual or schizophrenic narrator of Sasha Sokolov’s Shkola dlia durakov (School for fools, 1976), though otherwise anonymous, is moved to fill his mentor’s barrel with his own singular name.

The final subchapter of the prose text of Doctor Zhivago takes the narrative, at least by implication, beyond the Stalin era. In these last four brief paragraphs of the epilogue,1 lurii Zhivago’s surviving childhood friends, Misha Gordon and Nika Dudorov, now at the twilight of their lives, are reflecting on Zhivago’s literary legacy and on what lies ahead for Russia in the 1950s. In the first paragraph they are shown sitting at a window overlooking Moscow as a summer dusk slowly settles. They are reading from an album of Zhivago’s writings that his half brother Evgraf had compiled some years previously.

The Grass of Oblivion, a novel by Valentin Kataev, is a tribute to the Russian writers who were forced to choose their path during the revolution and the civil war. The theme may seem outdated, but the approach to the theme and its literary treatment are amazingly original and modern. In all of Soviet literature it would be difficult to find tragic images comparable to the two poets in this narrative (Bunin and Maiakovskii) who are compelled, finally and irrevocably, either to accept or reject the role offered to them by the new social order. Yet these images are outlined with such grace and elegance, and so tempered with irony, that an ambivalence, an almost diabolic duality is etched into the characters and events. Even the character of the narrator appears split, further complicating the multileveled narrative structure of the novel in which reality is so densely interwoven with fantasy that a third, synthesizing plane of meaning emerges.

Western specialists have long recognized the importance of the private sector1 of Soviet agriculture to the economy in general and to family subsistence and income in particular. It provides a large proportion of the country's crop and vegetable output (primarily potatoes, vegetables, and fruits) and an even larger share of the products obtained from animal husbandry. In 1966, for example, the private sector produced 55,800,000 tons of potatoes or 64 percent of the USSR's total gross production of potatoes; 7,400,000 tons of vegetables or 43 percent of total production; 40 percent of its meat; 39 percent of its milk; and 66 percent of its egg production (see table). Of paramount significance is the fact that the private sector produces these quantities on only slightly more than 3 percent of the USSR's total sown land.