Since Viktor Shklovskii first made the distinction, critics of fictional forms who invoke the concepts of siuzhet and fabula have been prone to exalt the former at the expense of the latter. The preference is hardly surprising. The fabula is after all an abstraction. It designates the narrative in its raw or pre-aesthetic form from which the finished artistic product (siuzhet) is ultimately shaped. And it is a simple matter of definition that the literary critic must be primarily concerned with the literary artifact rather than its ingredients.

If the priority is legitimate, its implications should not be misunderstood. For fabula and siuzhet are not, after all, inimical or competing concepts. Our apprehension of the one stems directly from our experience of the other. True, a triumphantly ingenious manipulator of the stuff of fiction (a Sterne, a Joyce, a Nabokov) may create a nonlinear siuzhet of such kaleidescopic and multilayered complexity that our perception of the events as they are supposed “actually” to have occurred may become blurred.

In examining the development of Tsvetaeva's lyric verse, it is possible to discern a recurrent thematic strain: a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role. I will try to show that Tsvetaeva, in the process of rejecting, via her poetry, this key ingredient in a person's self-concept—namely, the sex role as defined by society—along with a rejection of other limiting social norms, developed images of the self that transcend social roles. Moreover, the working out of this poetic identity is not continuous but falls into several chronological stages.

In discussing a poet's self, critical method prescribes that a distinction be maintained between the individual and the poetic persona. Without negating this methodological stricture, it is important to keep in mind that for some poets an adequate interpretation requires one to perceive that the persona is an elaborate poetic projection and mythologization of the individual.

On April 21, 1957, the "Slogans of the CK KPSS for May 1, 1957" appeared on the front page of Pravda. This was the ninth list of Central Committee slogans to be issued following the death of Stalin. Its principal significance was the indication it gave that at long last Soviet slogan-makers had made an effort to face up to the moribund state into which the slogans had fallen. Under Stalin the slogas devolved into a formula-ridden repetition of stock words and phrases, ever growing more long-winded and dull. Gone were the brief, pungent slogans in the classic manner: "Who does not work— does not eat."

“Witnessing for the Defense” takes readers into the adversarial courtroom in postreform Russia. A fundamentally new type of public arena, the courtroom allowed representatives of the state (prosecutors) to debate with professionals (defense attorneys and expert witnesses), each side making a case about criminal behavior and justice for society (jurors and the readers who followed reports on trial) to judge. Analyzing how the defense changed over time for the same type of crime, the murder of a lover by the woman whom he had jilted, Louise McReynolds shows how the courtroom provided a place for the discussion of newly emerging concepts and theories from the social sciences. Psychiatry is especially important because it was raising questions of individual personality and personal responsibility that had the potential to undermine the status quo. Thus this article shifts the focus on the legal reforms of 1864 from politics to culture.

This article offers the first major investigation of the Holocaust in wartime Soviet music and its connection to questions of Soviet Jewish identity. Moving beyond the consistent focus on Dmitrii Shostakovich's 1962 Symphony no. 13 ﹛Babi Yar),I present an alternative locus for the beginnings of Soviet musical representations of the Nazi genocide in a now forgotten composition by the Soviet Jewish composer Mikhail Gnesin, his 1943 Piano Trio, “In Memory of Our Perished Children.” I trace the genesis of this work in Gnesin's web of experiences before and during the war, examining Gnesin's careful strategy of deliberate aesthetic ambiguity in depicting death—Jewish and Soviet, individual and collective. Recapturing this forgotten cultural genealogy provides a very different kind of European historical soundtrack for the Holocaust. Instead of the categories of survivor and bystander, wartime witness and postwar remembrance,we find a more ambiguous form of early Holocaust memory. The story of how the Holocaust first entered Soviet music challenges our contemporary assumptions about the coherence and legitimacy of Holocaust musicas a category of cultural history and present-day performance.

Although Cement was a model for later socialist realism, Katerina Clark has argued that Gleb Chumalov does not achieve consciousness, a requirement for later heroes, but instead remains spontaneous. In this essay, Eric Laursen argues against Clark's widely accepted interpretation. By introducing the idea of instinct (class, worker, revolutionary), which Anna Krylova has shown to be central to Bolshevik thought in the early years of the twentieth century, Laursen argues that Gleb does gain consciousness. Gleb does not move from spontaneity to consciousness, however. Instead he learns to control and guide his own instincts and those of others. Two other characters also transform themselves. Gleb's wife Dasha illustrates a similar but distinct path forwomen. Sergei Ivagin, who must abandon conscious thought to first develop instinct, illustrates a different path for the intelligentsia. The attainment of consciousness is presented as a rebirth or maturation and involves the acquisition of “conscious language.” In the party purge at the end, those who speak unconsciously, therefore misleading and confusing the masses, are cast out of the party. The newly conscious Gleb and Dasha, who now speak properly, take their place as leaders.

This paper offers an empirical description and analytical interpretation of the borsa—the largest black market for rock music in Bulgaria in the 1980s. The text illuminates the distinct characteristics of the urban locale that became the focal point of rock fans’ desires and ambitions, examines how the interactions between the entrepreneurs who supplied the music and their adoles-cent clients were embedded in enduring networks of trust, and explores the peculiarities of the borsa as a site where western works of art were mechanically reproduced. It also demonstrates that the place where admirers of rock music met was enlivened by political energies and deliberately demarcated as a space in which ideological differences could manifest themselves, thus contesting Alexei Yurchak's argument that in late socialism it was possible to be loyal to and love “both Lenin and Led Zeppelin.“

“In case of Russian invasion, would you be ready to pick up arms and fight or would you flee the country?” This morally charged question has recently been pre-occupying the Latvian collective imagination. The Latvian Ministry of Defense has conducted several nation-wide surveys to monitor the public's response to it. Focusing on two controversies that recently erupted in the Latvian public sphere, this essay maps the growing militarization in Latvia and the tensions in the symbolic space between the state and the citizen that it brings to the surface. I argue that the recent militarization brings into sharp relief the socio-economic and political tensions created by several decades of postsocialist neoliberal restructuring. To the extent that we can observe here contemporary reconfigurations of the state and political subjectivity, I propose considering the Baltics as not only geopolitical but also analytical borderlands.

Parading under an innocuous title, this essay intends to disarm some of the extreme tensions that still surround the image of Stalin. The disarming, as Elizar Maltsev suggested, has to take a philosophical turn, reaching from the political and biographical data of the specialists into the larger issues of politics and morality that agitate an age of global interdependence and escalate the nuclear arms race. In times like the present, scholarship and a broad concern for the drift of events should overlap. Put differently, this essay tries to enlist the philosophical and historical faculties necessary to examine — and to do so humanely — the harsh context in which Stalinism operated.

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.

Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.

Brym and Degtyarev argue that in the "volatile" post-Soviet context, the potential for anti-Semitism is high. On the basis of responses drawn from 988 interviews conducted in Moscow in 1992 they conclude that the number of anti-Semites in Moscow is much higher than in the United States or Canada, and they also conclude that anti-Semitic orientations are part of a broader authoritarian, xenophobic and illiberal set of attitudes.

Since the Twentieth Party Congress, a controversy has developed in the Soviet Union concerning the activities and views of Anatolii Vasilievich Lunacharsky (1875-1933). Lunacharsky was the USSR's first commissar of education and an important and controversial figure in the arts during the 1920s. Of particular interest in the current debate is the underlying issue of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union today. In praising or attacking Lunacharsky, writers can set forth in an oblique manner their views on topics that cannot always be openly discussed. In this debate those who advocate change in the arts policy and those who support the current policies can confront each other, in an acceptable way, on such issues as censorship, the party's role in the world of art, artistic experimentation, and a variety of other issues of vital concern to artists and writers in the Soviet Union.