Nabokov’s unfinished novel, Solus Rex, composed in Paris during the winter of 1939-40, was the final flowering of the author’s “last season of Russian prose writing.” The novel was ultimately abandoned following Nabokov’s emigration to America in May 1940. Nabokov apparently intended to resume work on it, for in a letter of April 29, 1941, to his new friend Edmund Wilson, he remarked that he had “left Europe in the middle of avast Russian novel which will soon start to ooze from some part of my body if I go on keeping it inside.”There was no resumption, however.

A chance archival discovery prompted the question which forms the title of this article. Unfortunately, my attempts to answer the question soon revealed that the attribution to Feofan Prokopovich of the celebrated treatise, Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei (The Right of the Monarch’s Will in Designating the Heir to His Realm), rests on sand. In fact, it gradually transpired that nearly every other major work traditionally and for the most part unquestioningly ascribed to Prokopovich is similarly open to doubt. The ramifications of these findings branch throughout the field of early modern Slavic studies, since the Prokopovich of scholarly tradition is one of the most important literary and historical figures of his time (16817-1736) in both Russia and the Ukraine.

The “psychoprophylactic method” of preventing or minimizing pain in childbirth was developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s by Il'ia Zakharevich Vel'vovskii, a neurologist working at the Ministry of Transport's Central Psychoneurological Hospital for Southern Railroad Workers in Khar'kov. In 1951 the Ministry of Health adopted Vel'vovskii's method as standard procedure for normal births in all obstetrical institutions in the USSR and undertook a large-scale program to provide the facilities and trained personnel for its implementation. This decision was based on more than simple recognition of a successful medical innovation, particularly since Soviet obstetricians were far from giving it unqualified approval. It owed more to the political and ideological imperatives of Stalin's regime which were then intruding deeply into the work of Soviet scientists and physicians.

In 1921 a young American doctor named Armand Hammer went to Russia, met Lenin, and undertook the first American concession in Soviet Russia. Interest in this episode has been heightened by the fact that fifty years later Armand Hammer, as chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, forged new commercial links between the United States and the Soviet Union. This article provides a new interpretation of Hammer’s meeting with Lenin and his receipt of the first American concession granted by the Soviet government. It throws light on how Soviet national security objectives and personal relations can influence Soviet government decisions on American trade.

Nineteenth-century Russian writers often displayed an existential quality that is significant not only because it was apparently indigenous but because it was one of the first features of Russian thought to influence the West. There is no accepted label for this trait—Geoffrey Clive uses the term “intuitive existentialism,” while Marc Raeff speaks simply of a “more or less existentialist” philosophic temperament —but, by any name, its influence on the development of existential thought in the West is undeniable. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus each acknowledged the importance of Dostoevskii in relation to their own thought, while many religious existentialists, and even the atheistic Heidegger, have found their concerns partly anticipated in a work such as Tolstoi’s Death of Ivan Ilich. Similarly, if less frequently, Vladimir Solov'ev, Konstantin Leont'ev, Lev Shestov, V. V. Rozanov, and especially Nikolai Berdiaev have attracted the attention of specialists on existentialism.

In a recent article in Voprosy istorii KPSS entitled “The Bolsheviks and Revolutionary Creativity in the Provinces (July-October 1917),” A. S. Smirnov analyzes those hotbeds of radicalism where events took a sharp swing to the left, at a rate often surpassing revolutionary developments generally, even those in Petrograd itself.1 In such diverse and far-flung places as Helsingfors, Lugansk, Shlissel'burg, Minsk, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Kazan', and Tsaritsyn, revolutionary politics bred endless crises, demoralizing the national government and at times embarrassing and perplexing leaders of revolutionary parties. One would think that Soviet historians and propagandists would seize eagerly upon the opportunities these case studies provide to show the degree to which revolutionary ideas had gained support from local populations across the country. But this is not necessarily the case.

Like their zemstvo counterparts, the municipal dumas played a major role in determining the quality of life in tsarist Russia from the Great Reforms until the Revolution in 1917. During this period of rapid urban growth, the dumas had the authority to regulate housing conditions. They bore major responsibility for ensuring an appropriate level of public health and sanitation, welfare and social services and for developing public education, transportation, parks, and recreational facilities.

The restrictive municipal “counter reform” of 1892 destroyed some of the promise of urban self-government, however, and with few exceptions, city government entered the twentieth century with a reputation for apathy, indolence, and indifference to all but the narrow concerns of the tiny propertied elite to whom local affairs had been entrusted. Perhaps Den', a leftist paper, was too harsh when it characterized the record of a St. Petersburg duma as one of “criminal indifference and cynical unconcern.” But recently historians have taken a similar, if less biting view:

Ever since the early days of Bolshevik rule, Soviet leaders have promised to equalize socioeconomic development among the union republics. Their reasons, as I. S. Koropeckyj notes, have ranged from the ideological to the purely political. Equality is deemed an ideological necessity: every region must achieve a similarly advanced stage of development in order to pave the way for communism. Regional equality is also viewed as a way to defuse the nationality issue—in the short run by minimizing the socioeconomic disparities inherited from tsarist days and in the long run by creating a new climate in which local nationalism will disappear. The benefits of equalization should also spill over into the international arena, where the advances of traditionally underdeveloped Soviet regions highlight the “appeals of the Soviet development model for impatient revolutionary modernizes.”

Soviet statements of policy on nationality relations traditionally have expressed a commitment to equalize economic development among the union republics of the USSR. As early as the 1920s, Soviet leaders promised to reduce differences between more advanced and more backward republics. The program adopted in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the intention of “devoting special attention to those areas of the country which are in need of more rapid development.” The goal of economic equalization among union republics is said by Soviet sources to have broad social and political significance, and the elimination of disparities in the economic base is thought to be necessary for the achievement of harmony among Soviet nationalities.

The calamitous fire which destroyed Moscow in 1812 precipitated a momentous urban renewal, which took on special architectural significance because it made Moscow one of Europe's foremost classical cities. To a greater degree than London, Edinburgh, Berlin, or Vienna, Russia's old capital acquired a “neoclassical” look despite the reappearance in it of much that was traditional and wooden. The purpose of this article is to stress the significance of the fire as a watershed in the city's history, noting those planning and building antecedents that gave rise to the new city after 1812.

The legitimacy of ruling Communist parties rests, in large part, on their alleged identity with the working masses. Ties to the citizenry are crucial for these parties if they are to retain Marxist credentials and, thereby, their rationale for taking power and maintaining an authoritarian system. All political systems, authoritarian ones included, seek willing obedience from citizens if for no other reason than efficiency. But as a subset of authoritarian polities, Communist states have an additional burden. No ultimate truth, national interest, or religious purity sanctioned their road to power, although national interests are increasingly used by many Communist parties to attain greater credibility with citizens. Instead, Communists' identity with the interests of working people constitutes the primary rationale for their hold on government.

The Land Captain Statute of 1889 is invariably regarded as the foremost legislative act of Alexander III’s reign, and with good reason. While Governor V. P. Golitsyn of Moscow probably exaggerated in calling it “no less significant and extensive than the peasant reform” of 1861,’ contemporary officials of diverse views agreed that it was the most controversial and important piece of domestic legislation in the 1880s. Yet for many years historians paid little attention to it or to Alexander III’s reign as a whole. Rather they dismissed the land captains (zemskie nachal'niki) as a reactionary institution intended to counter the revolutionary unrest of the late 1870s by increasing the patriarchal authority of the landed gentry. Soviet studies in the past two decades have filled in many details concerning the elaboration of the land captain legislation and have added a Marxist-Leninist slant in contending that gentry class interests influenced the autocracy to introduce the measure. Not surprisingly, they emphasize the role of A. D. Pazukhin, a wealthy gentry marshal and zemstvo board chairman from Alatyr' district (Simbirsk province), in drafting the counterreform during 1885-86 and persuading the infirm Minister of Internal Affairs D. A. Tolstoi (who died almost three months before the promulgation of the law on July 12, 1889) to support it. Yet in essence the Soviet interpretation of the land captains as part of a reactionary “new course” begun abruptly in the mid-1880s and designed to turn back the clock in the countryside adheres, as do most Western accounts on the topic, to the views of pre-Revolutionary “liberal” historians.

Isaak Babel'’s masterpiece of revolution and civil war, though a collection of short stories, is also a book shaped into an artistic whole by patterns of style and a central action or plot. Renato Poggioli detected two major stylistic strains in the work —the “epic-heroic” and the “pathetic“—an insight that criticism has yet to pursue. Though much of Red Cavalry is devoted to genre sketches and anecdotes (many told in the speech of its characters, or skaz), the epic and pathetic modes function as polarities about which the diverse tales are organized. Each has its own language and clusters of imagery, and their interplay lends the work its distinctive shape and meanings.

The USSR has entered a new, qualitatively higher stage in constructing a Communist society—“mature” or “developed” socialism. Theorists envision progressively higher developments to occur in this stage and commonly regard the scientific technological revolution as one of its defining traits. Reflecting objective changes that have occurred in society’s production forces, the scientific-technological revolution poses an unprecedented challenge to political leaders: they must now “integrate complexity and manage change through advances in organization and technology.“ This challenge cannot be successfully met without the support and active participation of specialists in administrative policy. While theorists and politicians alike remain convinced that only socialism provides the optimal framework for organizing societal development, they begrudgingly acknowledge that the reputed advantages of the Socialist economy—national planning, public property, class solidarity—do not manifest themselves automatically, but must be brought to life through the creative application of scientific knowledge and organizational skill.

In his short sketch, “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District,” Ivan Turgenev imagined the provincial marshal of the nobility to be “a man of unrestrained and dignified expression entirely in keeping with his starched shirt-front, infinitely broad waistcoat, and round snuffbox full of French tobacco.” For Turgenev and many contemporaries, the marshal's studied pomposity and ostentatious cosmopolitanism signified the overweening social pretension and thin veneer of Westernism which constituted the worst features of the Russian nobility. The marshal of the nobility was a frequent target for social satirists through most of the nineteenth century.

The relationship between Chekhov's fiction and earlier nineteenth-century Russian fiction still awaits thorough critical investigation. Certain aspects of the problem, notably Chekhov's intellectual and literary reaction to Tolstoi, have frequently been discussed, but the question as a whole, as well as many specific facets of it, has not been adequately treated. For instance, until very recently, the name of Dostoevskii has been virtually absent from Chekhov criticism. The reasons for this are under-standable. In contrast to abundant information on Chekhov's attitudes toward Tolstoi and his works, the documentary record contains little evidence which sheds strong light either on the extent of Chekhov's familiarity with Dostoevskii's works or his opinion of them. Political or literary-historical preconceptions may also have imposed critical blinders. Despite the dearth of external evidence, it seems highly improbable that so widely ranging a reader as Chekhov would not have made some acquaintance with the major works of a writer of Dostoevskii's artistic stature and public prominence.

Archbishop Antonii’s Kniga Palomnik (circa 1201-4) is the earliest extant account of a Novgorodian pilgrimage to Constantinople. The work has long been valued by historians as a document of the Byzantine capital's treasures on the eve of the Latin invasion and by philologists as a model for the literary genre known as the khozhdenie. Recent scholarship suggests that Kniga Palomnik’s readership was far wider than previously supposed and that Archbishop Antonii’s literary skills should not be underrated. But when it comes to analyzing the appeal of the work, the critical consensus ends. Some view Kniga Palomnik as an exemplary account with a few insignificant breaches of etiquette. Others contend that the author’s talents are most apparent in rhetorical exhortations, where he lapses from the genre’s decorum. There are grounds for both positions. Kniga Palomnik is indeed typical, in that it consists of a series of descriptive essays framed between exordial and concluding topoi. At the same time, Antonii’s fondness for rhetoric undeniably signals a break with tradition. My own findings indicate a third alternative, namely, that the rhetorical “lapses” and the “normative” passages conform to a system of etiquette compatible with but distinct from that of the account of the journey per se.

In 1892, as Moscow prepared to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Saint Sergei of Radonezh, an article appeared in the Moskovskiia vedomosti which suggested that one appropriate way to mark the occasion would be to erect a replica of the small wooden Church of the Holy Trinity built by Saint Sergei at the site of his famed monastery north of Moscow. The article further urged that the project be a cooperative effort and that the proposed church be constructed in one day (that is, a twenty-four-hour period), in the tradition of the obydennye khramy of old.’ The tradition which the civic-minded writer of the article tried to revive dated back to the late fourteenth century. The early Russian chronicles record nineteen one-day votive churches built between 1390 and 1552, all as a response to the pestilence then raging. Ten of these were constructed in Novgorod, nine in Pskov. In addition, four others, one each in Moscow, Iaroslavl', Vologda, and Viatka, can be documented from other sources. All were built of wood in a twenty-four-hour period by communal labor.

The final subchapter of the prose text of Doctor Zhivago takes the narrative, at least by implication, beyond the Stalin era. In these last four brief paragraphs of the epilogue,1 lurii Zhivago’s surviving childhood friends, Misha Gordon and Nika Dudorov, now at the twilight of their lives, are reflecting on Zhivago’s literary legacy and on what lies ahead for Russia in the 1950s. In the first paragraph they are shown sitting at a window overlooking Moscow as a summer dusk slowly settles. They are reading from an album of Zhivago’s writings that his half brother Evgraf had compiled some years previously.