Mao Tse-tung's 1949 victory has frequently been credited to Mao's ability as an astute peasant revolutionary rather than to his standing as an orthodox Communist leader. The record suggests that Stalin's development of tactics for Mao had more influence on the course of events than is commonly supposed. It is the purpose of this study to indicate the influence upon the Chinese revolutionary leadership of Stalin's doctrines.

This essay investigates the geopoetic strategies through which Muslim writers contributed to as well as undermined the consolidation of the Russian literary canon. Its central focus is the Azeri writer Celil Memmedquluzade’s translation of Gogol’’s work, revealing the politicization of Gogol”s poetics in the Muslim south Caucasus in 1905. Drawing upon Gogol’’s prose about the Russian provinces, its translation in the Caucasus, and its resurrection in literary theory, I illustrate the ways in which the poetics of the imperial provinces intersected with the Russian and Soviet imperial gaze, highlighting the internalizing force of imperial expansion as well as the radical alterity of the colonial experience. The early twentieth century was marked by a series of revolutionary upheavals in the imperial capital and periphery, as well as a Bolshevik ideological campaign to envision literature as an enlightened enterprise, that is, one characterized by both its scientific and political power. In dialectical fashion, the creation of a revolutionary poetics involved a repetition of Gogol’’s prose in order to reconcile and thus transcend the series of binaries associated with nineteenth century literature: center/periphery, oral/written, self/other. Gogol’’s resurrection in Memmedquluzade’s translations and in the hands of his Formalist and postcolonial critics highlights the role of Russian imperial geopoetics in simultaneously sustaining and subverting a revolutionary literary culture

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:

In this article Andreas Schönle explores the treatment of ruins in the Romantic period, in particular the propensity toward holistic reconstruction, rather than preservation of architectural heritage. He argues that the Romantic disregard of extant heritage harks back to the Sentimentalist infatuation with the fleetingness of life and dramatization of loss, that this melancholy feeling stoked a sense of national victimization, and that it legitimated an imaginary reinvention of the past and the constructedness of collective memory. The Church of the Tithe in Kiev serves as a case study illustrating that the Romantic commitment to totality has resulted in the significant destruction of architecture. Depictions of its ruins in travel accounts and in the writings of Vadim Passek and Andrei Murav'ev evidence a marked desire to exacerbate the sense of loss rather than to describe and valorize the remains. This disregard of heritage reprises the Sentimentalist infatuation with melancholy prominently deployed by Nikolai Karamzin. A comparison with Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in France and Augustus Pugin in England indicates that in Russia the invention of a national style of architecture required a much more radical imposition upon the historical landscape.

The article demonstrates the presence of (homo)sexual subjectivity in rural Poland in the early 1920s using remarkable correspondence between two men who stood trial for committing homosexual acts in 1925. It argues that their relationship should be understood as the first documented same-sex secret marriage in Poland. By investigating relations between urban and rural spaces in the spread of sexual knowledge in the Second Republic, the article also analyzes how changing notions of male friendship and masculinity at the time could be used by men loving men to develop and pursue their own distinctive visions of love and pleasure.

The Czech Group of Fine Artists published their journal, Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly, 1911-1914) to justify their abstraction and their interest in French cubism in response to criticism that denigrated their work as incomprehensible and foreign. In this article, Naomi Hume argues that the Group's strategy was fundamentally at odds with how avantgardes have been understood to operate in scholarship on modernism. Rather than asserting a break with the past, the Group applied new Viennese art historical approaches—particularly those of Alois Riegl, Max Dvořák, and Vincenc Kramář—to draw parallels between their work and prior art objects that departed from mimesis. They equated their radical style with what Riegl called anachronisms in art's development, moments when an independent will to form emerges from the mainstream. By bringing French cubist ideas into dialogue with the inherent spirituality of their own national tradition, the Group saw themselves as reinvigorating Czech art.

After Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, it soon became apparent that his successors were in no hurry to dismantle his handiwork in the field of defense policy or to introduce major military policy innovations of their own. One may surmise that this tendency to mark time was the natural product of succession politics within the new collective leadership arrangement. As in most other major policy areas, Brezhnev and Kosygin no doubt felt the need for a breathing spell while in the process of consolidating their new regime.

In Russia the exit of an autocrat, whether voluntary or involuntary,is traditionally a signal for a popular sentiment that “it is time for a change” in other ways, too—a change for the better, of course. And sometimes such hopes have been at least partially realized, as when a hundred years ago the accession to the throne of Alexander II (1855-81), in the midst of the disastrous Crimean War, eventually brought about such important liberal reforms, despite all their shortcomings, as the eagerly awaited emancipation of the peasantry from the hateful serfdom, the judicial and other reforms. More often, however, such popular aspirations have proved to be what the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II (1894-1917), called “senseless dreams” when at the beginning of his reign he scoffed at modest suggestions for establishing a representative government. Yet, despite many disappointments, the tradition that a basic change accompanies a new regime has persisted.

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.

This article is an interdisciplinary study of the Vidovdan Temple (c. 1906-13), a sculptural-architectural whole that was Ivan Meštrović's most controversial and most widely interpreted work. I analyze visual culture and intellectual history to show how this particular artwork became highly instrumental in creating and strengthening Yugoslavism's primordialist dimension, which sharply marked the South Slavic territories’ political landscape in the decade preceding the first Yugoslav state's creation. Not only did Meštrović's artwork epitomize the idea of a South Slavic primeval unity, dismissing the national distinctiveness of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, it also enunciated an emphatic message of South Slavic political unification. By analyzing the Vidovdan Temple's contemporaneous critical reception, I question its classical interpretation as a symbol of Yugoslav multicultural synthesis, arguing for a more contextsensitive and nuanced understanding of the ideology of Yugoslavism.