In this article, Roman Koropeckyj and Robert Romanchuk present a Lacanian reading of the preface and “The Fair at Sorochintsy” from Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm near Dikan'ka, vol. 1 (1831), viewed through the prism of American blackface minstrelsy. They trace representations of ethnicity and class in Gogol'’s “performance” of Ukraine. Their analysis of the preface demonstrates how Pan'ko’s Ukraine reaches a Russian lowerclass audience through the intervention of the gaze of an Other, an elite nonreader. The self-absenting of this Other opens a space for the audience’s imaginary identification with the Ukrainian minstrel, while structuring this space symbolically. Their analysis of “The Fair” demonstrates how this “opening” creates a fantasy of Ukraine as a world of unbridled sexuality, simultaneously repressed and re-presented by the story’s Russian- language fabula and elegiac “bookends.” The repressed Ukrainian content irrupts, symptomatically, in the story’s epigraphs. Akin to minstrelsy’s “blackening” of American popular culture, the tension between the repressed and the expressed adumbrates the “Ukrainianization” of Russian national culture.

Pushkin’s Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin are five in number, and four of them (“The Shot,” “The Blizzard,” “The Stationmaster,” and “The Lady-Peasant“) belong to the same literary species. The narrative features binding this quartet of stories together are, in the main, conventional. Each relates—among other things—the story of a young man who, having won the affections of a beautiful woman, overcomes some obstacle (or series of obstacles) which threatens their union, thereby paving the way to, or consolidating, a mariage d'amour at the end of the tale. All of which is to say that embedded in each is one of the oldest of all plots, the “successful courtship.“

It is generally agreed that Hegel and his younger and somewhat leftist followers contributed to shaping the philosophical and economic views of Marx. Not so generally recognized is the impact of a Polish writer, August von Ciezkowski, whose influence is the subject of our query. This note is not intended to be an original contribution on the subject but a brief restatement of an interesting proposition concerning Marx's intellectual origins by a German professor of philosophy, Reinhard Lauth. To the best of my knowledge Professor Lauth's proposition has not been discussed as yet on this side of the Atlantic.

The eleventh thesis of Marx on Feuerbach, appended to his Deutsche Ideologie (1845-46) reads: Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt darauf an, sie zu verändern. Its meaning is well known and the alteration from interpretation to change, from theoretical to practical philosophy, has been stressed sufficiently.

In Newspapers and in magazines, as well as in books (including The Encyclopaedia Britannica and The American Year Book) these two spellings are encountered, and a divergence of opinion exists as to which of the two is more correct or more desirable. The following explanatory remarks may be useful, as an unpretentious voice from the past, to those who will be in charge of bringing about a satisfactory solution of Central European problems. These remarks are not prompted, in the slightest degree, by the spirit of antagonism or animosity; on the contrary, they are intended as a contribution toward the removal of controversies, from a wider and more exact perspective, based on personal travels and experiences in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia, including the period September 10–25, 1938.

This article analyzes the causes and consequences of Islamophobia in the Russian Federation following the story of the Russian ban on the works of a scholar of Islam from Turkey, Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878–1960), despite the overall positive reception of his ideas and followers by Russia's Muslims. It positions Russia's existing domestic anti-Muslim prejudices, which evolved in the contexts of the Chechen conflict and the influx of migrant workers from culturally Muslim former Soviet republics to cosmopolitan Russian cities, against the background of the post-9/11 global fear narrative about Muslims. These Islamophobic attitudes in turn informed and justified anti-Muslim policies in Russia, as the Russian state, following broader trends of centralization and illiberalization in the country, abandoned the pluralist policies toward religion of the early post-Soviet years and reverted to the late-Soviet model of regulation and containment in the past two decades.

Mark Kramer agrees with Cohen’s general argument and welcomes Cohen's rebuttal of the “retrospective determinism” that is so common in the literature on the subject, but he raises questions about the way Cohen defines and assesses the “Soviet system.” Kramer argues that it is important to distinguish between the Soviet system and the Soviet state and that the demise of the former did not have to be accompanied by the end of the latter. He also expresses concern that Cohen's article implies, if only inadvertently, that the Soviet system could not have survived unless it had been drastically reformed.

Stephen Kotkin is surely right that Russia cannot be understood fully through the lens of its elections and that it is conceptually risky for political scientists to treat U.S. democracy as its analytical point of departure. He also makes a good point that governance, institutional quality, and actual state performance need to be studied along with civil society and political parties.

Fortunately, today's field of political science offers a wide range of works that agree. Without producing a long bibliography, we might mention Kathryn Stoner-Weiss's and Daniel Treisman's recent books on center-periphery relations and governance; Maria Popova's and Peter H. Solomon's research into the Russian judiciary; Lucan Way's study of the institutional underpinnings of authoritarianism; and lively debates on the state's management of the economy and its ability to provide social services.

The interwar period in Poland between 1919 and 1939 was punctuated by three significant crises in ethnic relations: the presidential succession of 1922, the Pilsudski coup of 1926, and the “pacification” of the Ukraine in 1930. This article is an attempt to sketch certain aspects of these crises based primarily on records of parliamentary debates. Within the walls of Parliament ethnic conflicts were aired and articulated openly. Here the claimants spoke to and with one another, rather than solely to their own particular clienteles.

The number of non-Polish inhabitants within the frontiers of post-Versailles Poland has been variously estimated at between 30 and 45 percent of the total population, depending on the source, time, and method of classification used in the estimate.

In the course of the nineteenth century it became clear that the unfettered speculation obtaining in philosophy frequently could not be useful in science. However, in the Soviet Union it is asserted that natural science can draw its correct "theoretical conclusions" only by relying upon the philosophic and the methodological teachings of dialectical materialism. Certain Soviet Marxists have, on allegedly philosophic grounds, rejected Western genetics, the resonance theory of the chemical bond, the principle of uncertainty of quantum mechanics, relativist cosmology, the relativization of space, time, and matter, probability theory, and symbolic logic. The intriguing question then remains whether Soviet dialectical materialists determine the validity of scientific theories and accomplishments on the basis of a priori judgments derived from philosophic analysis or whether the Soviet attacks on Western scientific thought are, rather, political and ideological in nature.

Less than a year before his recent death, the distinguished émigré poet-critic Georgii Adamovich published one of his last essays in the New York Novyi Zhurnal. One section of it was particularly striking. Here was the “dean” of Russian émigré criticism and the author of hundreds of critiques and articles over the past fifty years questioning the purpose of literary criticism and whether there was a need for it at all: “In criticism … what is amazing is that behind all the innumerable articles and pieces of research, even the most penetrating of them, one never discerns the least perplexity about why, in fact, the article was written… Do Tolstoy, Dickens, and the others really require explanation and commentary ? Wasn’t Tolstoy right …that ‘criticism is when the foolish write about the wise’ ?”

Accounts of the Russian peasant movement of 1905-1907 have conventionally stressed its violent and spontaneous character. At least in the core provinces of the Central Agricultural Region, Volga, and parts of the Ukraine, where economic relations between peasants and gentry estates were highly exploitative, land hunger pressing, and the repartitional commune still viable, arson and destruction of estates were the most dramatic forms of agrarian activism. Peasant insurrection would crest in the weeks following promulgation of the tsar's October Manifesto, in some cases as the result of willful misinterpretation of that document, more often as a reaction to news of revolutionary occurrences in the cities and confusion among local authorities.

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leavening effects of the Enlightenment began to be felt among the Rumanians of Transylvania. The Enlightenment in Transylvania—and in Eastern Europe generally —was a curious blend of natural law, rationalism, and optimism, drawn from the West, and nationalism, a response to local conditions. It is no coincidence that the first tangible signs of national awakening among the Rumanians manifested themselves at this time. In the thought of the Enlightenment they discovered new justification for their claims to equality with their Magyar, Saxon, and Szekler neighbors. For example, they applied the notion of “natural” civil equality between individuals to the relationship between whole peoples, and they accepted wholeheartedly the myth of the social contract as the foundation of society and as the guarantee of the rights of all those who composed it.

Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the “taming of the arts.” Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the “revisionist” generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham suggested that the middle-class values apparent in the literature of mature Stalinism might reflect a “Big Deal” between the bureaucracy and the cultural tastes of the new Soviet “middle class,” while Sheila Fitzpatrick maintained that even in the heyday of Stalinism, some prominent intellectuals held positions of “cultural authority,” enabling them to influence the course of cultural life.

Social historians have argued for three decades that the Russian Revolution was preeminently a workers’ revolution. Leopold Haimson was the first to propose, in an influential 1964 article, that workers themselves, and not, as the prevailing wisdom then held, Lenin and the Bolshevik party, prepared the way for the October Revolution. In this article, however, I will argue that in some instances ideological institutions had shaped the workers’ expectations.

The mute scene at the end of Nikolai GogoFs comedy The Inspector General has been described as apocalyptic, metapoetic, and pictorial. It begins when the gendarme announces the arrival of the real inspector general to the town’s corrupt officials: their horrified expressions create a protracted, silent tableau, and the audience (having been told in the play’s epigraph and the mayor’s aside that they are looking at their own “crooked mugs”) is left to stare back at the players for ninety seconds. Gogol' expected this scene to be a transformative moment for all of Russia. But exactly how he meant for the tableau to set up a moral-aesthetic event has never been adequately explained.

As some critics have noted, for Gogol' images of viewers looking at paintings are a means of commenting on the potential power of art over the human soul.

The earliest submission of the Dalmatian cities to Venetian sovereignty, around the medieval millennial year 1000, remained fundamental for the mythology of Venice’s political culture right up to the end of the history of the republic in 1797. Giacomo Diedo, whose history of Venice was published in 1751, focused his attention upon “the first acquisitions of the Venetians in Dalmatia, which then might serve as a base for further advances.” In fact, the coastal cities of Dalmatia would serve Venice in the most literal (and littoral) sense as bases for an imperial commercial domain that advanced beyond the Adriatic to the eastern Mediterranean, but for Diedo, and his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Dalmatia was also an ideological base on which to construct a culturally convenient vision of Venetian empire. The Dalmatians, in order “to secure themselves from the molestations of the barbarians” (the Narentani along the river Neretva), appealed for the protection of Venice, so that the Adriatic armada of the Doge Pietro II Orseolo was welcomed “with acclamations by the inhabitants who saluted him as their liberator.”

One hundred years ago, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergius of Radonezh, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii delivered the principal address to the Moscow Theological Academy. With his first tortuously long sentence the historian created an imaginary continuum, transcending time, between his audience and the saint. His words bear repeating: