The subject of this article is the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, one of several sensational Jewish ritual murder cases to unfold in central and eastern Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By focusing on a region far removed from Tiszaeszlár, the article underscores the rapidity with which antisemitic violence traversed Hungary in the early 1880s. In examining the causes, function, and impact of this violence, Robert Nemes demonstrates the centrality of the provinces for understanding the depth and dynamism of political antisemitism in Hungary. Nemes also argues that Tiszaeszlár acted as a formative political experience for many people in the provinces and explores the wider consequences of this event, both in the near and in the long term.

It is difficult to think of any writer of any century who has displayed such a wide range of verbal talent as Vladimir Nabokov. His flashing prose has earned him an important place both in American and in Russian literature. Original prose and poetry, translations of prose and poetry, meticulous scholarly criticism and commentary, devastating literary polemic—everything seems within his range. But Nabokov’s chameleonic transformations from Russian into English and English into Russian are particularly fascinating to watch. He has translated (or helped translate) his own Russian novels, including Priglashenie na kazn’, Zashchita Luzhina, and Dar, into English; he has translated English works including Pnin, Speak, Memory, and, most recently, Lolita into Russian. The metamorphosis of Otchaianie into Despair is a special case, because while translating the novel Nabokov made certain revisions.

Let Peary seek his Arctic goal;
His countrymen prefer a Pole
Less brumal and uncertain;
And Roe and Howells the prolix
Must bow to Henry Sienkiewicz,
Democratized by Curtin.
Anonymous, "Columbus Sienkiewicz,"
The Outlook, New York,
March 12, 1898

The subject of Henryk Sienkiewicz and America is hardly exhausted with the acknowledgment of the enormous popularity of Quo Vadis in the United States. Sienkiewicz himself visited America in 1876, in fact traveled extensively through the country and recorded his impressions at some length in his Listy z Ameryki (Letters from America), a large part of which was translated into English and published in 1959. Sienkiewicz's relations with Helena Modrzejewska (Modjeska) and her debut in the American theater at the time of his visit add to the interest of his sojourn in the United States. Another phase of Sienkiewicz's relations with this country embraces the fascinating career of his American translator, Jeremiah Curtin, whose name remains as intimately linked with translations from Polish literature, particularly the works of Sienkiewicz, as Constance Garnett's has been with English renditions of the Russian masters of the nineteenth century.

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has been engaged over the past several years in a project to collect and analyze information on the Soviet and East European field. Some of the results of the work to date are presented in this report to the profession.

The field of Soviet and East European studies is a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. Not until World War II was there any considerable interest in the region in the United States. At that time, however, the federal government found itself acutely short of specialists on the area and had to scrape a shallow academic barrel. The lack of expertise led to the establishment of new military and civilian training programs; and the changed international situation in the postwar period gave further impetus to the extension of academic programs.

This article discusses the concept of politarism (politarizm), developed by die Soviet ethnographer Iu. I. Semenov as an elaboration on Marx's Asiatic mode of production. Presenting both its origin in the revisionist debates of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras and its recent application in an innovative analysis of Russian colonialism in Alaska by the ethnohistorian A. V. Grinev, Sonja Luehrmann attempts to grasp the intellectual complexity of Semenov's work. While the Soviet debate on the Asiatic mode of production has been read as Aesopian criticism of the USSR, it may more fruitfully be seen as an argument against a strict five-stage scheme of historical evolution that opened up new possibilities of concrete empirical analysis and a new theoretical role for ethnography as the science of noncapitalist societies. Grinev's use of politarism in the 1990s shows the lasting explanatory value of the concept as well as the need to understand the origins of Soviet intellectual traditions in order to critically engage with them.

The article recounts the Bolsheviks’ first attempt at organizing the economic life of their young project in peace time following the establishment of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. It argues that the Bolsheviks built their regime on a liberal foundation, concretely the gold standard; although this is often noted in passing, it has not been given the socio-economic weight this political decision deserves. In an attempt to establish their monetary authority within their territory—a sine qua non for the formation of state authority—and in international markets, they appealed to the legitimating institution of the gold standard. The prescriptions of that institution led to a set of policies and chronic political anxieties that structured much of the domestic and international policies of the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s. The study documents the thinking behind the monetary reform that tied the Communist project to the liberal world order as well as the international economic conjunctures that determined its small failures and eventual success. The analysis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of money as a social institution, and aims to renew the historiographical debate over NEP by establishing its trajectory firmly within the international context that governed it.

When the bolsheviks took power in November 1917, they openly proclaimed their commitment to a secularized Russia. This meant, above all, combatting both the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution and popular Orthodox beliefs and practices.

In the second two decades of the nineteenth century the picture of Russia presented in French journalistic writing was fear-inspiring. In particular, during the Napoleonic Wars and, even more pronounced after the advent of Nicholas I to the throne, French publicists initiated anti-Russian campaigns, which were destined to culminate later in the mid-nineteenth century as one of the catalyzing causes in the final alignment of France against Russia during the Crimean War. The purpose of this article is to trace the origins of this Russophobia in French pamphlets, travel books, and other popular works about Russia, as well as in diplomatic reports, before 1830.

During the nineteenth century a series of revolts took place in Albania. These revolts, although some of them were on a relatively large scale, were local in character and aimed neither at national autonomy nor independence. Their primary target was the taxes and the draft which the Ottoman Government, in accordance with its program of reforms—the so-called Tanzimat—was trying to impose upon the Albanian people. It was not until the Congress of Berlin that the movement began to take a different course.

When Russia defeated the Turks at the end of 1877, she imposed upon them the Treaty of San Stefano (March 3, 1878), which accorded to the Balkan Slavic nations large pieces of Albanian land. Serbia was allotted a strip of Albanian-inhabited territory in Old Serbia. Bulgaria and Montenegro were especially favored. The first country was to expand westward even into Albania, including the major part of the province of Korea (Koritza).

In this article, Katherine Metzo examines the creation of Tunka National Park in Russia's Lake Baikal region. Formed in the last days of the Soviet Union, the park represents the efforts of local indigenous elite to manipulate state policies on conservation to return control over natural resources to the local population. Metzo sees the formation of the park as part of a cultural revitalization movement through its ties to a broader Buriat national-cultural movement that emerged in late socialism. Movement leaders were vnye, in Alexei Yurchak's sense of the word, as they promoted their personal as well as the national-cultural agenda through the inbetween spaces created in the discussion of nature conservation.

During the Napoleonic wars the future existence of Habsburg Galicia was regarded as uncertain, and in the period following the Congress of Vienna the identity of the province was likewise unclear. The eighteenth-century creation of Galicia gave way to the nineteenth-century attempt to create Galicians and to discover a non-national provincial meaning of “Galicia,“ capable of reconciling and transcending national, religious, and linguistic differences. In this article Larry Wolff juxtaposes the political perspective of Metternich and the literary perspective of dramatist Aleksander Fredro in order to analyze the imperial and provincial dynamics of the idea of Galicia, with fürther attention to the public sphere of newspapers and journals, and the cultural perspectives of Galicians like Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (the son of the great composer) and Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński (founder of the Ossolineum library in Lviv). This article traces the evolving cultural meanings of Galicia up until 1835, the year of the death of Habsburg Emperor Franz and the year that Fredro was denounced by a Polish critic as a “non-national” writer. Especially in Fredro's celebrated comedies, it is possible to discern the submerged ideological tensions of empire and province that shaped Galician identity in the early nineteenth century.

The study of the Macedonian identity has given rise to far greater controversies and debates than that of most, if not all, other nationalisms in eastern Europe. This has been only in part due to the hazy past of the Slavic speaking population of Macedonia and to the lack of a continuous and separate state tradition, a trait they had in common with other "small" and "young," or so-called "non-historic," peoples in the area.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Russian imperial authorities advocated colonizing Siberia and linking it to the center. This process was difficult: not only was the region remote, but it also had a reputation for lawlessness that was intensified by the 1822 expansion of the exile system. In this article, Abby M. Schrader examines one attempt that authorities undertook to civilize Siberia. Attributing much of the disorder that prevailed in Siberia to the region's severe gender imbalance and lack of stable households, officials sought to promote marriage among banished men. In doing so, authorities laid bare important preconceptions about Russian women's socio-sexual role. Rather than perceiving women as agents, they saw them as tools that could be deployed to enhance the larger social order. Placing stock in the potential for women to settle Siberia's exiles also provided authorities with an opportunity to displace blame for the failure of their policies upon women.

The CPSU Politburo has traditionally been regarded as a group of politically powerful individuals. This article will suggest that it can simultaneously, or even alternatively, be viewed as a collection of positions. Politburo membership is not a full-time job. All members hold positions in other institutions, which constitute their occupations, the areas in which they are building their careers. Despite the absence of formal rules linking Politburo seats with specific offices, it is unthinkable that the connection would be random or that it would be arbitrary. Because the positions provide institutional identifications for individuals and tie the work of the Politburo to the activity of important Soviet elites, the pattern of representation depicts the institutional balance of forces in the regime and reflects the overall character of the Politburo and its role in the political system. A positional view of the Politburo is thus essential to defining it and understanding its development as an institution.

Nearing death, Nikolai Stepanovich of Anton Chekhov's “A Boring Story” struggles with the question of whether his newfound pessimism results from recent illness or belated insight. While the novella's physiologistprotagonist never reveals his self-diagnosis, it can be surmised from a careful reading of his scattered symptoms in light of contemporary medical intertexts that he fears he is suffering from a diabetes of nervous origin, the etiology of which was first hypothesized by his real-life colleague, Claude Bernard. The search for a historical disease concept, however, far from resolving Nikolai Stepanovich's crisis of identity, opens onto an expanse of further problems, including the reduction of mind to body in post-Griesinger psychiatry as well as the social pathology of fin-de-siècle “neurasthenia.” Caught between the options of illness and insight, Nikolai Stepanovich follows the course of his own spiraling thoughts, which—in a paradox typical of a tradition of melancholia extending from Aristode to Sigmund Freud—seem to grow more penetrating the more his marasmus advances, yet unearth less meaning from his life the deeper they penetrate.

In recent years the historiography of Catherinian Russia has made small but perceptible strides toward engendering or at least toward discussing women as historical subjects outside the specific context of the household. Beginning with Brenda Meehan's 1976 article “Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule,” most attention has focused, appropriately, on female rule and the question of how a patriarchal culture accommodated itself to the preponderance of female rulers in the last three-quarters of the eighteenth century. In the interim, several scholars have had occasion to expand upon this theme, and yet most would agree that much remains to be explored on this topic.