How the narrative dynamics of The Idiot shape and inform its ethics is the focus of this article by Alexander Spektor. The Idiot is one of the most radical of Fedor Dostoevskii's novelistic experiments inasmuch as it questions the integrity of the self created through the process of narrative representation and interpretation. Dostoevskii achieves this effect by contrasting the idea of the inherent distance between sign and meaning with Myshkin's initial belief in the possibility of the transcendental signifier. The reader is gradually forced to accept that any form of participation in the big dialogue of the novel is bound to cause intense rivalry for the control of its meaning, which ultimately leads to physical violence either against the self (Ippolit and Nastasia Filippovna) or against others (Rogozhin). Dostoevskii undermines the integrity of any narrative formation of the self, including the self of the reader, by framing it within nonverbal acts of violence and compassion. Hence, The Idiot can be read as a Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, traverses the distance between the novel's is—an attempt to secure positive ethical meaning (within an established) narrative—and the novel's ought, the silent and nonsensical acts of compassion that, ultimately, defy signification. To make sense of The Idiot requires the reader to participate in an ethically compromised endeavor. Forced to do justice to the text, the reader also has to bear responsibility for the violence inherent in any narrative construction of the self.

Historians have differed in their evaluation of the nationality problem in the Habsburg Empire, but they have generally agreed that the Military Border maintained along the southern boundaries of Hungary and Croatia constituted a traditional element of dynastic strength. “There arose,” Oscar Jászi wrote, “a proverbial Habsburg patriotism, perhaps the only real one which the Habsburgs were capable of fomenting in their realm.“ The dissolution of the Military Border in Croatia-Slavonia, which took place soon after the celebrated Ausgleich of 1867, has been considered a serious blow to the military posture and the stability of the monarchy. Yet such appraisals need a critical reassessment. After the middle of the nineteenth century, South Slav national tendencies profoundly altered; and the Border became a blunted and much less “reliable” instrument of imperial policy.

Russia's balance of trade (torgovyi balans) and balance of payments (raschetnyi balans) were matters of great concern to the tsarist government before and after the introduction of the gold standard in 1897. Tsarist officials feared that the gold reserves required to maintain (or to go on) the gold standard would be lost if payments abroad exceeded receipts. Moreover, there was concern over the potential loss of political and economic independence if the government had to borrow abroad regularly in order to cover international payments deficits. Russia's foreign policy toward France and Germany was affected significantly by this consideration. Thus, considerable importance rested on the reported estimates of these two balances.

The Soviet comic writers Il'ia Il'f and Evgenii Petrov traveled across America in late 1935–36, gathering material for the travelogue published upon their return as “Odnoetazhnaia Amerika” (One-Story America) in the journal Znamia and then as a book in 1937, just at the time of Il'f's death. The book was a popular success and remarkably influential: the architectural structures of “One-Story America“—its skyscrapers, staircases, one-story bungalows—reappear in literary and cultural monuments of the 1930s and 1940s, namely Mikhail Bulgakov's novel about the Devil's eventful visit to Moscow, The Master and Margarita, and Sergei Eizenshtein's essays on montage. These works share an interest in the construction of space and perspective: paradoxical spatial constructions, embedded spaces, verticality, the “trick of the skyscraper,” and what Eizenshtein referred to as the “charm” of “acrobatic points of view.“

The article examines how the post-WWI, post-Habsburg city-state Fiume (today known as Rijeka in the Republic of Croatia) tried to shore up loyalty and diminish local discontent by providing welfare and economic initiatives, in direct conjunction with how much neighboring states offered. Of particular concern were comparisons with how the Fiume state dealt with the Krone currency crisis, especially as locals in Fiume were very aware of and traded in currencies of neighboring lands using the same base money. The article calls for more work to be done on the dynamic of “on-the-ground” post-imperial Europeans questioning their new governments based on how they compared their lot with their other post-Habsburg neighbors.

In this essay I explore how Soviet policymakers, biologists, and writers negotiated the borderline dividing the human and animal domains and conceptualized the animal world for ideological purposes. I link the classic Soviet clash between stikhiinost’ (spontaneity) and soznatel‘nost’ (consciousness) with biological experiments of the 1920s that were set to deconstruct the human-animal hierarchy and to create a vision of “classless” biology. I show why Dzhan, one of Andrei Platonov’s first earnest attempts to evolve into a socialist realist writer glorifying the Soviet state’s firm strides toward the communist future, fails to achieve the semantic certitude of the Stalinist text. Various recurrent and profoundly unconventional themes, often connected with animality and corporeality, drastically muddle the ideological coordinates of the text and preclude the possibility of a clear passage from stikhiinost' to soznatel'nost'. The (a)political status of the Dzhan people as a newly formed Soviet collective body manifests itself in the complex interplay between two rather commonplace categories: body and soul. The body acquires abstract political qualities by becoming collective, while the soul, as a designator for the Dzhan people and as a category, gains flesh. The novella reveals the “Turkmen” nation as a site of bare life itself in its indestructible corporeal glory.

Like Balzac and Dickens, Dostoevsky is one of the great mythographers of the modern city; and, like them, he was a journalist as well as a novelist. The motley contents of his Diary of a Writer are, if not well known, at least available to the curious in English translation. His journalism before 1873 is a different matter: this work remains untranslated and largely unexamined, though it contains much that sheds light on his artistic practice—including the feuilletons, published at the very beginning of his career and called, significantly, a “Petersburg Chronicle.” What they show us is the young writer, in search of a persona, confronting the city and experimenting with the themes and attitudes that would later go into his myth of Petersburg.

The terms of the experiment were in good part furnished by the times.

Russian revolutionists in the 1870s had a long history of opposition to build on—from the massive Pugachev peasant rebellion during the reign of Catherine the Great to an aristocratic conspiracy (Decembrist Revolt) at the end of the reign of Alexander II. They also drew on a rich indigenous fund of social criticism and programs, the latest and most important of which were the writings of Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev, the proclamations of the Land and Liberty group, and the radical economic articles of Chernyshevsky.

A future revolutionary, Alesha Karamazov is, at nineteen, an inexperienced boy who lives in a monastery and who has been considered strange since birth. Fedor Dostoevskii endows him with hysteria—then a serious psychopathology with convulsions that were clinically seen as analogous to epilepsy, the morbus sacer from which Dostoevskii himself suffered. Recognized as an epidemic problem, hysteria in this novel is elaborately deployed as a symbol of Russia's social ills and the underlying cause of farreaching personality changes in Alesha (for better or worse), preparing him for a heroic destiny. Although hysteria was soon altered and later eliminated as a clinical syndrome, James L. Rice enables us to read the novel for the first time in the light of documented medical history.