Late in Doctor Zhivago, after its lyrical nature descriptions and idyllic back-to-the-earth retreats in rural Varykino, we run into the following startling passage:

“Just what does it mean, this face …?” Evgenii Pavlovich asks himself in the last pages of Idiot (p. 485). Evgenii Pavlovich has just come away from a last meeting with Prince Myshkin, to whom he has given an exhaustive, and gratuitous, accounting of the prince’s misconduct. The prince, of course, is more than willing to accept the blame. All he can plead in his defense is the face of Nastas’ia Filipovna. “But there was something else,” he urges, “something which you left out because you don’t know it: I had looked upon her face! Even that first morning in the portrait I could not withstand it” (p. 484). Such extraordinary susceptibility to the human face puzzles Evgenii Pavlovich. For all his perspicuity, this self-appointed raisonneur has a blind spot—even though he soon laughs off the prince’s words as the raving of a “poor idiot!” (p. 485). His baffled question, however, only serves to reiterate an issue that the entire novel in one way or another has posed from the opening pages: What is the meaning of the human face?

Every effort is being made to retain in the literature programs of the Soviet schools and universities all the best work of the Russian literary giants of the nineteenth century. There is even a trend in Soviet scholarship to place the best literary work of the Soviet period in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Russian classics. Lenin repeated time and again that it was necessary “to assimilate critically all that is valuable from the preceding culture.” Some Soviet scholars go even further and claim that socialist realism and its best representatives are continuing the literary traditions of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers. Konstantin Fedin is thought of as one who continues Turgenev's “traditions of intellectualism” and shares his ability to be “a chronicler of his epoch, a creator of unforgettable women characters,” and Sholokhov is regarded as a writer who further develops Tolstoy's style. Some Soviet critics even complain because there is no visible link in the educational programs to connect Mayakovsky with Pushkin and Lermontov.

Each of these rich essays is framed as the discussion of a specific emotion or emotional attitude—the “perception of emotional coldness” (Andrei Zorin), “fear” (Jan Plamper), “disgust” (OlgaMatich and Adi Kuntsman). But these authors offer us both much less and much more. Less, because individual emotions cannot really have their own history, independent of the kinds of self or emotional styles that emerge in given periods. More, because each essay opens u p to these broader, interdependent configurations of self and emotion, creating a window on a complex landscape of emotional change. Zorin's study of Andrei Turgenev provides a glimpse of the transition from an eighteenth- to an early nineteenth-century emotional regime. Plamper's examination of the emergence of military psychology traces the development of a late nineteenth-century social science of the “psyche.” Olga Matich explores the somatic anxieties of an early twentieth-century novelist, reminiscent of a whole strain of troubled and troubling early twentieth-century reflection. Adi Kuntsman probes the powerlessness of victims of Stalinist-era labor camps, whose sufferings resemble those of millions of others caught in modernist state projects aimed at administering mass emotions.

In the labyrinthine world of Rumanian politics, it was easy enough to find striking examples of corruption in high places and low, year after year, both before and after World War I, and to dismiss the country's parliamentary form of M government as a sham or as an imitation of the West. But in 1919 many Rumanian had reason to expect the future to be brighter than the past. The approximate doubling of Rumanian territory and population and a happy ending, to the long-fought struggle for national unity seemed a most auspicious foundation for Rumania's new postwar life. Social justice and the exigencies of the modern world were being addressed by the advent of universal suffrage for men and the first stages of extensive land reform.

Professor Rosefielde makes at least two important points: some official Soviet physical output series really were (and are) exaggerated, and output expansion in the 1930s was not based on a surplus extracted from agriculture. But his valiant efforts lack a sense of proportion, and his exaggerated claims weaken his case.

His version of the “standard theory,” for example, appears to confuse intentions with actuality. It seems to me that informed Western consensus about events between 1928 and 1940 runs as follows: Soviet output increases were obtained through very large increments of labor and fixed capital, without much contribution from technological progress.

In Western economies, considerable short-run output instability derives from the individual actions of resource owners to employ and produce and from the actions of consumers to spend and save according to their own best interests. This economic freedom at the lowest level enables firms and individuals to vary their spending between resources, goods, time, and place, and hence to create opportunities for imbalances between the quantity of output which producers would like to sell and the quantity which consumers would like to buy. Thus, shortages and surpluses may be created in the current period which affect the level of production in subsequent periods.

The proponents of central planning argue that a system of state resource ownership and the authority of planners to establish a wages and incomes policy and to allocate productive resources stabilize the behavior of producers and buyers in the economy. It is said to assure a greater homogeneity of economic objectives, rewards, and standards of performance, and offers the opportunity directly to influence the use of resources. With the control of resources, planning has the potential of projecting sector needs and of coordinating the demand and supply in various industries so as to reduce the frequency and severity of short-run adjustments in output.

In this article, Konstantine Klioutchkine explores Nikolai Nekrasov's model of personality as it emerged at the intersection of his poetry, his public life, and his contemporaries’ accounts about him. The fascination with Nekrasov stemmed not so much from the veneration of his civic achievements as from the curiosity about his profligate lifestyle and glamorous ethical failures. Exemplary tensions within Nekrasov's lyric and public personae enabled his contemporaries to negotiate between the recognition of progressive values, the pursuit of unsanctioned pleasures, and the experience of moral infirmity. Discussions of Nekrasov's inherently contradictory personality suggested that, for members of the intelligentsia who came of age between the 1850s and 1880s, his personality symbolized what they had already sensed about the nature of their own selves but could not admit until later decades.