Through the juxtaposition of early autobiographical fragments by Lev Tolstoi and Daniil Kharms, Sara Pankenier argues that both writers similarly push beyond the limits of memory to recover the infant self from the abyss of infantile amnesia. Their accounts of preternatural memory and precocious self-awareness counter the phenomenon, which psychologists now term infantile amnesia, whereby the onset of memory occurs only several years after birth. They thus flagrantly violate human experience, as well as the literary conventions that otherwise govern the representation of infancy. By endowing the infant self with adult memory—and narrative voice—these writers create a hybrid autobiographical self that unites the divided autobiographical subject posited by Philippe Lejeune. Despite the differences in their tragic and comic tone, both Tolstoi and Kharms employ the infant subject to explore issues of power and voice through narrative experimentation in an uncharted region of memory otherwise made inaccessible by infantile amnesia.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state turned out to be pretty adept at authoritarianism, and the voters have appreciated it. That, at any rate, is the broad upshot of these three articles.

Following what has seemed the dominant tendency in the Anglophone political science literature on contemporary Russia, Henry E. Hale and Timothy J. Colton examine not governance but elections. The two scholars confirm “arguments that Putin draws a great deal of vote-winning power from how people view his performance and that the economy is a large part of this.” Readers may have believed this before encountering this article (I did), but Hale and Colton demonstrate the point marshaling evidence.

In this article, Katherine Metzo examines the creation of Tunka National Park in Russia's Lake Baikal region. Formed in the last days of the Soviet Union, the park represents the efforts of local indigenous elite to manipulate state policies on conservation to return control over natural resources to the local population. Metzo sees the formation of the park as part of a cultural revitalization movement through its ties to a broader Buriat national-cultural movement that emerged in late socialism. Movement leaders were vnye, in Alexei Yurchak's sense of the word, as they promoted their personal as well as the national-cultural agenda through the inbetween spaces created in the discussion of nature conservation.

This article provides an analysis of the locus of fear in military psychology in late imperial Russia. After the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution, the debate coalesced around two poles: “realists” (such as the military psychiatrist Grigorii Shumkov) argued that fear was natural, while “romantics” upheld the image of constitutionally fearless soldiers. Jan Plamper begins by identifying the advent of modern warfare (foreshadowed by the Crimean War) and its engendering of more and different fears as a key cause for a dramatic increase in fear-talk among Russia's soldiers. He links these fears to literature, which offered—most prominentiy in Lev Tolstoi's Sevastopol Sketches (1855)—some of the vocabulary soldiers could use to express their fears. Mikhail Dragomirov's fear-centered military theory during the Great Reforms was the next milestone. Plamper closes by sketching the history of fear after World War I, from Iosif Stalin's penal battalions to the rehabilitation of military psychology under Nikita Khrushchev and beyond.

This article presents a critical political ecology of the various forms of tree theft in a Bulgarian locality. Based on primary fieldwork carried out almost annually since 1992, Chad Staddon argues that even in a relatively tightly bounded space such as a single locality or forest stand, environment-society relationships are sufficiently complex to make the enterprises of analysis and theory-building quite challenging. Yet, as this case study of tree theft shows, it is precisely because environment-society relationships are so intertwined that a “symmetrical” treatment of humans and nonhuman actors is required that takes us well beyond the bounds of “traditional” political ecology. Locating the treatment of tree theft in just such a social theoretical framework offers many benefits. Staddon contends that it is not possible to really understand, or develop policy for, tree theft without carefully considering the relational networks that bind together all the protagonists, including loggers, foresters, policy-makers, and local people, as well as trees, forests, road networks, and other nonhuman agents.

The article examines the aversive emotion of disgust and its deployment in the visual arts and in the premier Russian modernist novel, Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, which has not been considered in regard to its affective poetics before. Based on recent studies of the emotions in cultural history and theory, it explores the philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of disgust as a response to something viscerally and/or morally repugnant. The emotion, induced by the experience seen or imagined close up, provokes the observer's recoil as defined by cultural norms. As such, disgust is performative in spatial terms. Olga Matich argues that movement away from the loathsome image or idea affords the possibility of making the experience cognitively readable or legible, that disgust creates a space in which the individual negotiates her emotional as well as moral response. Yet she claims that aesthetically—and in certain instances ethically—disgust, which is always about the boundaries of the permissible, is also liberating: it offers society, its artists, and their consumers the opportunity to transgress established norms. Through extensive close readings of Petersburg, Matich shows that Belyi's experimental novel does precisely that, challenging the reader not to avert her readerly gaze from that which is unsettling and to appreciate, even to delight in, his shocking metamorphic image-making. She calls Petersburg a modernist exemplar of baroque aesthetics, characterized by excessive affect and grotesque representation, especially of the corpse, invoking the transience of life and dissolution of form.

In this article, Monika Greenleaf shows how Marina Tsvetaeva protested the erasure of her generation's intimate and embodied styles of memory by postrevolutionary historical narrative. While Soviet writers began to disappear into the Lubianka, labor camps, translation programs, children's literature, and silence in the 1930s, exiled writers found themselves in European capitals contesting the keys to legitimate memory before the emigration's fractured milieux de mémoire. In a piece written for oral performance in Paris, Tsvetaeva uses Bergson's famous techniques of bodily and musical memory-retrieval and comic revelation of temporal rhythms and archetypes to frame her childhood memoir as an exemplary mimetic rite for her generation. Bergson's synergistic theory of “matter and memory“ promised total recall, whereas Walter Benjamin's meditation on the different nature of memories that “flash up at the moment of danger” offers new insight into the fiercely selective comic scenes her mnemonic technique “produces.” Greenleaf's examination poses the question: What is the nature of the past that involuntarily repeats itself through our bodies and the very configuration of our imaginations: living Being or copying machine? Is the poet's act of memory socially useful or dangerous and “mad“? Mimesis according to Aristotle or Plato?

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.

Taking methodological cues primarily from James Buzard's book The Beaten Track (1993), Susan Layton examines the socially divisive construction of the Russian tourist abroad in mainstream writings published in Russia between 1856 and 1863. It was during this early reform era that Russians first began publicly worrying about turisty and turizm as components of their national culture. The prism of divisiveness complicates a scholarly tendency to interpret the production of imperial Russian travel narratives as a nation-building enterprise from the eighteenth century onward. Although nationalist sentiments persisted in early reform public discourse concerning leisure travel, writers also fissured the nation along lines of social estate, gender, education, cultural competence, and moral values. Layton's comparative approach establishes parallels between snobbish nineteenth-century English and Russian views of ill-prepared “crowds” of tourists abroad but underlines Russian convictions that all Russian travel to western Europe should pursue educational and moral benefits.

Stalin's support for Trofim Lysenko in the late 1940s has come to exemplify Stalinist science and the deleterious effects of gross political intervention in scientific affairs. In this article, Ethan Pollock turns our attention to the harsh criticism of Lysenko that occurred in the Central Committee in the last years of Stalin's life and situates that criticism within a broader move in Soviet ideology toward nauchnost' or scientific truthfulness. In the later 1950s nauchnost' grew even stronger in nearly every other field of science. Still, Lysenko prolonged his hold on power in Soviet agricultural science as Nikita Khrushchev attempted to reassert the importance of partiinost’ or partymindedness. Lysenko's promises of great agricultural rewards and plans to radically transform nature were only fully rejected by the party when Khrushchev himself was removed from office.

In the early twentieth century, police-regulated prostitution experienced a burst of attention from Polish-language news media. In this article, Keely Stauter-Halsted considers the extended moment of “moral panic” that unfolded when a series of public exposes revealed the scope and potential dangers of sex trafficking. Taking into account the ways “respectable” urban audiences absorbed revelations of illicit commercial transactions on city streets and increased “white slavery” activity beyond the Polish lands, Stauter-Halsted stresses the image of the prostitute as a threat to the embattled nation. The figure of the impoverished, morally compromised streetwalker encroaching on bourgeois social spaces and invading the bourgeois home challenged the sense of middle-class respectability so crucial to Polish national regeneration. By exposing innocent members of the community to sexually dangerous behavior, the prostitute came to represent decay, degeneration, and venereal disease attacking the national body, a conclusion used by social purity activists in their protoeugenics campaigns.

This article addresses a topic seldom discussed in gulag studies: same-sex relations in the camps. In particular, it deals with affective politics of sexuality and class in gulag memoirs and the role of disgust in the formation of sexual and class boundaries. It approaches disgust as existing between the individual and the social, the subjective and the historical, the internal and the external, and traces the ways the gulag memoirs constitute the disgusting, the disgusted, and the boundary between them. At the center of the article are descriptions of same-sex relations in the Kolyma camps of the 1930s-1950s by Evgenia Ginzburg and Varlam Shalamov. Based on a critical reading of these and other memoirs, Adi Kuntsman reveals how same-sex relations among the common criminals are constructed by the memoirists as disgusting because they go against gender norms and against class perceptions of sexual morality. Kuntsman shows how these perceptions of the appropriate, embedded within the habitus of the intelligentsia, are transformed in the memoirs into the universal category of humanness, locating the common criminals, and, by association, anyone who engages in same-sex relations, beyond the bounds of humanity.

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.

Maria Kisel argues that Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita can be read as a persuasive novel, intended to educate Soviet readers who, like the character Ivan Bezdomnyi, are ignorant of history and culture beyond their insulated Soviet reality. Kisel demonstrates how Bulgakov's novel coopts the form and themes of the Soviet satirical feuilleton to explain the virtues of the prerevolutionary cultural realm rooted in the western European intellectual tradition. To render his own cultural perspective accessible, Bulgakov revisits his early feuilletons written for the newspaper Gudok, a category of writings he claimed to disdain. The Master and Margarita demonstrates a complex relationship with the imagined “Soviet reader,“ who is both an object of ridicule and a desired interlocutor. Examining the connection between the Master and Ivan as analogous to the teacher and disciple dynamic between Bulgakov and his own “Soviet readers,” this article offers a new interpretation of this well-loved and much-discussed masterpiece.

While a central policy of the Independent State of Croatia during World War II called for the removal of “Serbs,” the majority of people who identified themselves (or were identified by the regime) as Serbs in Sarajevo—the second largest city in the state—remained “safe.” In order to understand why this was the case, Emily Greble Balic examines the interplay between local identity politics and state policies of genocide and nation-building. In so doing, she sheds light on such broad issues as the ambiguity of national identity at the local level; the limitations of traditional understandings of “resistance”; and the options open to members of the victim, or “foreign” group, as a result of the disjunction between national and local agendas.

In this article, Mark Bassin explores Lev Gumilev's theory of ethnicity. Developing his ideas in the context of post-Stalinist debates about the relationship of society to the natural world, Gumilev maintained that the etnos was a wholly natural, quasi-biological entity. Although this naturalism involved an important genetic dimension, Gumilev denied that ethnicity was determined by race and emphasized instead its ecological quality as an organic part of biogeocenoses or natural-landscape ecosystems. Although he remained marginalized in his day by the Soviet ethnographic establishment, his essentialist perspective is powerfully appealing for post-Soviet audiences, who find his “ecology of ethnicity” singularly useful for the purposes of ethnopolitical discourse.

This article explores how culture in the USSR became “Soviet.” Malte Rolf describes how different fields of communication and cultural production generated criteria that could be used to attach the label “Soviet” to all features of culture. Sovietizing culture was a work in progress, and various institutions, agencies, and experts actively participated in defining an adequate “Soviet style.” Focusing on this interplay of agencies and taking mass festivals as an example, Rolf portrays the dynamics of a growing selfreferentiality within Soviet culture in the 1930s in such cultural spheres as architecture, city planning, and mass celebrations. Under Stalinism, canonized “Soviet” standards also set the agenda for everyday communications. By reproducing an officially privileged agenda, participants in these daily communications encouraged a cultural inner Sovietization during the prewar decade. This article explores how and why the cultural canon of a closed system of “Soviet” references made its way so smoothly into die microstructures of society.

Departing from the familiar scholarly focus on the ideological content of works by intelligentsia forerunners, this article examines the record of everyday life in their private and public writing. Konstantine Klioutch kine argues that their obsessive focus on ordinary experience indicated that articulating mundane desires was as important to the two writers as expressing progressive views. As professional journalists, Nikolai Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Dobroliubov organized their experience primarily by way of writing. Accordingly, the article explores rhetorical procedures accommodating both ideology and desire in their influential account of themselves as prototypical new men.

In August 1939, the Polish avant-garde writer and playwright Witold Gombrowicz left Poland for what was to be a month-long literary tour of South America. World War II broke out a week after Gombrowicz's arrival in Argentina, and he was never to return to Poland; instead he remained in Buenos Aires, where he would live for the next quarter of a century. In this essay George Gasyna argues that Gombrowicz overcame whatever nostalgic longings he may have felt for the homeland he had left behind—by an “accident” of world history—through articulating a new type of poetics, which Gasyna terms a “heterotopic imagination.” Employing a key term used by Michel Foucault in his archaeologizing of western cultural knowledge, Gasyna theorizes heterotopia both as a desire to articulate the existential condition of deterritorialization in the spaces between mainstream literary and cultural discourses, and as a kind of textual sanctuary from the world. Within the zone of heterotopia, Gasyna argues, an author's exilic imagination may transform the nonplace of language into a linguistic refuge, a home-in-language. In his reading of Gombrowicz's second and perhaps most outrageous novel, Trans-Atlantyk, Gasyna demonstrates that despite its overt stylistic deviation and blatant political provocations, the novel is primarily concerned with elaborating an exilic space of hope for an autonomous subject—in this case the deracinated author who chose to divest himself of the political pressures of being a Polish émigré in wartime and the Cold War era, in order to become “merely a human being.“