In the summer of 1994, political parties in Poland debated yet again the content and form of Poland’s first new constitution since the end of Communist Party rule. These arguments continued a process that had begun in 1989 and would continue until the ratification of a final document in May 1997. During the 1994 debate, each party offered its own version of a constitution, which was closely tied to its particular vision of the ideal new Polish republic. One of these groups was NSZZ Solidarity, the trade union successor to the social movement that had dominated opposition politics in the 1980s. In Solidarity’s version of the constitution, the state’s legitimacy was based on a community of Poles unified by a shared Catholic tradition. Political commentators who supported Solidarity’s constitution described it as follows: “Under the NSZZ Solidarity and presidential drafts [of the constitution] the Republic is the commonweal of the citizens.

The earliest submission of the Dalmatian cities to Venetian sovereignty, around the medieval millennial year 1000, remained fundamental for the mythology of Venice’s political culture right up to the end of the history of the republic in 1797. Giacomo Diedo, whose history of Venice was published in 1751, focused his attention upon “the first acquisitions of the Venetians in Dalmatia, which then might serve as a base for further advances.” In fact, the coastal cities of Dalmatia would serve Venice in the most literal (and littoral) sense as bases for an imperial commercial domain that advanced beyond the Adriatic to the eastern Mediterranean, but for Diedo, and his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Dalmatia was also an ideological base on which to construct a culturally convenient vision of Venetian empire. The Dalmatians, in order “to secure themselves from the molestations of the barbarians” (the Narentani along the river Neretva), appealed for the protection of Venice, so that the Adriatic armada of the Doge Pietro II Orseolo was welcomed “with acclamations by the inhabitants who saluted him as their liberator.”

In 1846, the Orenburg Provincial Gazette carried a brief account of the recent baptism of over 800 Mari pagans in a “distant corner” of Birsk district. As the newspaper reported, District Chief N. Bludarov, accompanied by his assistants and a priest, “by gradually gaining the trust of the Cheremis [Maris], finally succeeded in shaking their obdurate superstition by means of persuasion. At first only a few, then a large number, and finally by whole villages, [Cheremis] decided to accept the Christian faith, and in 1845, on the clergy’s lists, there appeared up to 900 new Christians.“ Since the mid-eighteenth century, baptisms on such a scale had been rare in the Volga-Kama region, and virtually none had occurred in northwestern Orenburg province, where the population was predominantly Muslim and “pagan.“ On the surface, therefore, these baptisms appeared to be a “happy beginning” of the Christianization of local Maris and a foothold for Orthodoxy in a heavily non-Christian area.3 In fact, matters were not quite so simple.

The 1 December 1934 murder of Soviet Communist Party leader Sergei Mironovich Kirov has long been considered a pivotal event in Soviet history, not least of all because of the attention it received in the USSR. But although there is much controversy over Stalin’s role in the assassination, and on the connection between Kirov’s death and the Soviet terror of the 1930s, most observers concur that once Kirov was dead, the government attempted to orchestrate public opinion of his death as a calamity with broad implications. For days after the slaying, the Soviet leadership devoted hours of radio time and pages of newsprint to mourning the loss of the 48-year-old Politburo member, Central Committee secretary, and Leningrad regional and city party leader and to denouncing those allegedly behind the murder. In turn, local party functionaries organized meetings of workers, peasants, students, and housewives to collectively mourn “Mironych” and to reflect upon his life and work, while also exhorting citizens to make donations of cash or labor in his memory. The authorities lauded Kirov as the “truest son and outstanding leader” (deiatel’) of the party; headlines proclaimed “Kirov can never be torn from our hearts” and “Until the end of our days we will remember your life and struggle, Comrade Kirov!“

Since Marx was strong on criticizing capitalism, not so strong on the practical mechanics of revolution, and rather wobbly on the communist future itself, we cannot blame his Soviet followers if their ultimate goal always remained a religious mystery, veiled by the pseudoscience of political dogma. The veil enhances the mystery; it obscures the fact that there is a mystery—that the real transformation of society into Utopia and the individual into unfettered homo laborans cannot be described in scientific language at all but can only be symbolized.

This becomes clear when we move from politics to art, to the sphere of culture dominated by symbolic language. Despite its debt to the explicit Utopian tradition of Chernyshevskii and the nineteenthcentury radicals, Soviet literature limits itself to an exclusively symbolic depiction of the flowering of communism. In Christianity, a transformation of analogous importance is symbolized by the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

The Russian prose poem was officially born in December 1882, when the journal Vestnik Evropy published Ivan Turgenev’s last work, a collection of fifty “poems in prose” (stikhotvoreniia v proze). Although the generic title of Turgenev’s prose miniatures seems to echo Charles Baudelaire’s Petits Poemès en prose (1869), the fate of the prose poem in Russia turned out very differently from that in its country of origin. Whereas the French poème en prose has become a mainstay of modernist poetry, the Russian stikhotvorenie v proze looks at first sight like a rather anemic plant struggling to survive in an inhospitable environment. In many respects, it constitutes a marginal genre par excellence: located in the no-man’s-land between poetry and prose, it was practiced mainly by minor writers, or by major writers only in early youth or old age (note the title Turgenev originally proposed for his prose poems: Senilia).