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In this article, Kristin Roth-Ey explores the complex and often convoluted reception of television technology in the USSR of the 1950s and 1960s. Television held out the potential to fulfill the long-standing dream of a universal Soviet culture—propaganda, art, and science delivered directly to every home—and it offered a compelling symbol of a modern Soviet "way of life" in a Cold War context as well. Soviet consumers and technological enthusiasts embraced the new medium with gusto and played an important role in its promotion. As Roth-Ey elucidates, however, the nature of television production and consumption—and, in particular, the Soviets' decision to promote a home-based broadcasting system—put television in implicit conflict with important Soviet traditions, ideals, and, at times, interest groups. The development of the mature form of centralized Soviet television symbolized by Moscow's Ostankino complex is the story of how political and cultural elites, consumers, and the Soviet system in an abstract sense struggled to make a "home" for television technology in the USSR.

This article analyzes the role of Russia's changing readership and incipient print culture inDead Souls. Though Nikolai Gogol' was received in salon society, his primary allegiance was to print and the broad (and thus unsophisticated) readership that was beginning to buy and read printed texts. Like other of Gogol"s works ("On the Development of Periodical Literature in 1834 and 1835," "The Portrait"),Dead Soulsreflects the author's awareness of the severe limitations of this audience, especially their desire for conventional plot devices and their eagerness for characters with whom to identify. AlthoughDead Soulsinvites readers' participation, it also reflects Gogol"s growing skepticism about inexperienced readers' attempts to create meaning, his disdain for their judgment, and his desire to assert total control over the meaning of his art. Lounsbery considersDead Souls' reception and situates Gogol"s work in the context of the appearance ofLibrary for Readingin 1834 and other writers' approaches to the problem of Russia's reading public (notably Faddei Bulgarin and Osip Senkovskii).

Sir George Buchanan, Great Britain's ambassador to Russia during World War I, published his widely read memoirs in 1923. In those pages, he provided an influential account of the response of the Russian people to Germany's declaration of war:During those wonderful early August days Russia seemed to have been completely transformed. The German Ambassador had predicted that the declaration of war would provoke a revolution. He had even declined to listen to a friend who had advised him, on the eve of his departure, to send his collection of art to the Hermitage for safe keeping, as the Hermitage would, he foretold, be one of the first buildings to be sacked. Unfortunately for him, the only act of mob violence throughout the whole Russian Empire was the wholesale looting of the German Embassy on August 4. Instead of provoking a revolution, the war forged a new bond between Sovereign and people. The workmen proclaimed a truce to strikes, and the various political parties laid aside their grievances.

The history of the Soviet Yiddish State Theater (Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr, or Goset) provides an illuminating glimpse into the life of Jewish entertainers and the position of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. While Solomon Mikhoels, the theater's star actor and director from 1929 until 1949, is well known for his role in chairing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, and for becoming the first victim of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges with his 1948 execution, little research has been conducted on the theater to which he dedicated his life. Art and theater historians have evaluated the theater's aesthetic approach to selected productions, and Mikhoels's contemporaries have provided anecdotal glimpses into that artist's life by writing biographies of him, but there has not yet been an attempt to assess the theater's relationship to the state during its heyday or to place the theater within the context of Soviet culture of the 1920s.

Despite some early critical reservations, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita has become one of the icons of postrevolutionary Russian literature. The bibliography of scholarly commentary on the work—mostly adulatory, and in some cases even hagiographical—is vast. Bulgakov has become, especially for western critics, the epitome of the artistmartyr. Persecuted by the Soviet writing establishment, he was able, through his long suppressed satiric masterpiece, The Master and Margarita (published for the first time in 1966-67), to survive and turn the tables—aesthetically and morally speaking—on his former oppressors. Life is short, art is long; or as Woland expressed it, manuscripts do not burn.Indeed, there is ample justification for such a hagiographical approach. By 1928, when Bulgakov was drafting the first plans for The Master and Margarita, his literary prospects were already growing dim. In the 1930s, no longer able to publish original fiction, he survived by adapting works for the theater and by translating.

The question of humanity's moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a "clean sheet" whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a "living soul" endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as "the period of stagnation," began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of thederevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it stands for. "Slovo ved' bol'she veshch', chem veshch': ono samo veshch', kotoraia tol'ko znak." The signifier comes first and the signified trails after it, for the acoustic properties of the word expand its capability beyond mere denotation to poetic creation. The proper name too, far from being a mere representation in Tsvetaeva's view, draws its bearer into a broad range of associations and creates a complex personal universe that can be discovered by means of the poet's "khozhdenie po slukhu."From general observations on the importance Tsvetaeva ascribed to names in a variety of works, this paper will proceed to an examination of her 1916 dedication to Aleksandr Blok, "Imia tvoe—ptitsa v ruke." Analysis of this remarkable poem demonstrates vividly Tsvetaeva's realization of the creative potential of Blok's name. This specific example will provide the basis for a discussion of the broader implications of naming in Tsvetaeva's art.

"The Bolshevik party is not yet clear whether it should accept or reject the psychoanalytic theory of Freud."René Fülöp-Miller, 1925"Psychoanalysis has a future only under socialism because it undermines bourgeois ideology."Wilhelm Reich, 1929"You as Marxists should know that in its development the mentality of man lags behind his actual condition."Stalin, 1933For a little more than a decade following the Revolution of 1917, Russia experienced an unparalleled social transformation. Hardly any area of daily existence was left untouched by this juggernaut of change, from social mobility in the villages to the nature of the fine arts in the cities. If the term had not been appropriated by Stalin to describe the process of proletarianization in a somewhat later period, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe the decade of the 1920s in the Soviet Union as a genuine "cultural revolution." Parallel and independent efforts were made in many areas—politics, economics, philosophy, science, literature, painting, health care—to reconceptualize society in a socialist context.

In January 1964, Western observers of the Soviet scene were startled by the publication of the major short works of Franz Kafka in Inostrannaia literatura, a leading Soviet literary journal. This event was all the more surprising because it came only a few months after a wide-ranging party campaign against "modernism" in the arts, with Kafka among those singled out for special condemnation. Publication was viewed as evidence of a possible new thaw, and received considerable attention in the Western press. Over ten years have now passed, and, in these days of the expulsion and incarceration of protesters and the suppression of dissent, it is timely once again to examine the fate of Franz Kafka in the land which for decades pretended that he did not exist. As the following pages will show, the debate over Kafka was much broader than his works themselves: it raised questions which were disturbing Soviet society and reflected, in microcosm, forces struggling to determine the very direction of Soviet life.

A notable characteristic of Solzhenitsyn's earlier works, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovichto Cancer Ward, was their apparent philosophical and aesthetic eclecticism. Their author seemed neither to reveal the intellectual origins of his work nor to articulate in his novels a coherent philosophy of history or theory of art. One critic was forced to conclude that artistically Solzhenitsyn was an "eclectic with conservative leanings" whose main concern was with truth and honesty in literature. The publication of August 1914 tended at first to allay this feeling. Parallels of both form and content could be drawn between the new novel and Tolstoy's War and Peace. Further reflection, however, suggests that the comparison with Tolstoy raises as many difficulties as it resolves. But this does not mean that the riddle of the origins of Solzhenitsyn's thought remains insoluble. When examined in conjunction with the Nobel Prize lecture and the programmatic letter of September 5, 1973, to the Kremlin leaders, August 1914 does reveal the sources of Solzhenitsyn's philosophical and aesthetic views.

This article analyzes national loyalty and identification by examining the language exams administered to minority public officials in Romania in 1934 and 1935. The exams aimed at testing officials' knowledge of the state language, but given the broader political context they were more than a survey of linguistic skills. Examinees were singled out as non-Romanian and subjected to an additional requirement not demanded from their ethnic Romanian colleagues, interpreting the use of the official language as a sign of loyalty. Drawing upon theories of loyalty as a historical concept, the paper analyzes how the particular situation of minority public officials was reflected in these texts and how they created a specific identification for themselves, composed of important elements of their minority ethnicity but also expressing their identification with the state and its modernizing goals as members of a unified, professional public body. The language exams signaled the emergence of a specific category of minority public servants who were part of both the minority group and the middle-class functionaries of the Romanian state. Nationalist public discourse on both sides—Romanian and minority—have denied and erased the history of these hybrid loyalties and identities, but the languages exams help us to recover them.

The Qufu project is a collaboration of Shandong University, Shandong Provincial Institute of Archeology, UCLA, University of Michigan, and University of Texas at Austin. Our fieldwork at Qufu is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation for East Asian Archeology Grant (UCLA), the Ministry of Education of China 111 Project Grant (Shandong University), the Cotsen Institute of Archeology, the UCLA Senate Faculty Research Grant, and financial support from the Shandong Provincial Institute of Archeology. ; Peer reviewed ; Postprint

"This book describes the formation, transnational activities, and inner workings of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in exile. Made possible thanks to an in-depth examination of previously unutilised correspondence relating to the OUN, this title examines the organization during the first five years of its existence (1929-1934). In contrast to other available sources, such as the press or propaganda materials, the letters more faithfully present actual plans, motivations, and goals of the nationalists. The analysis not only uncovers unknown facts, but also reveals reactions, opinions, and emotions of individual activists. The book explores the structure and mechanisms of the OUN émigré networks by depicting tactics, decision making processes, and the efficiency of activities, as well as contacts and relations within the OUN and with the outside world. The international activity of the OUN is examined through the cooperation with individual countries, including Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, but also with lobbying efforts in Great Britain, France, Italy, and North America, where émigré activists of the OUN or their contacts were based. Finally, the book investigates the OUN policy towards activists operating on the area of the Second Polish Republic. This text will be of interest to scholars of Ukrainian history, nationalism, comparative fascism, and transnationalism"--

Defining the Identity of the Younger Europe gathers studies that shed new light on the rich tapestry of early modern "Younger Europe" — Byzantine-Slavic and Scandinavian territories. It unearths the multi-dimensional aspects of the period, revealing the formation and transformation of nations that shared common threads, the establishment of political systems, and the enduring legacies of religious movements. Immersive, enlightening, and thought-provoking, the book promises to be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the complexities of early modern Europe. This collection does not just retell history; it provokes readers to rethink it. Contributors: Giovanna Brogi, Piotr Chmiel,Karin Friedrich, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Mirosława Hanusiewicz-Lavallee, Robert Aleksander Maryks, Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin, Maciej Ptaszyński, Paul Shore, and Frank E. Sysyn.