A great many available statistics describe the population history of Russia, but explanations for these statistics are limited or nonexistent. The useful studies of fertility and migration that have appeared are primarily accurate reports of what happened. Studies of Russian mortality are wholly lacking, an understandable situation, since as late as 1913 only thirteen out of fifty provinces of European Russia had medical statistical bureaus. Despite all past efforts the history of Russia's health remains obscure.

While the health of the Russian people today is comparable to that of other Europeans, before the Revolution of 1917 it was extremely poor. In 1897, the year of the first national Russian census, the infant mortality rate for European Russia was 260 for each 1,000 births, compared to 222 for Germany, 164 for France, 156 for Italy, 156 for England and Wales, and 109 for Ireland.

In a study of English letters from the seventeenth century into the romantic era, Marjorie Nicolson analyzed the rise and persistence of topoi of mountain poetry. Beginning in the 1720s, such celebrated poets as James Thomson proved able to create compelling verse about peaks that they knew only from their reading; and even after seeing stupendous rocky terrain themselves poets tended to produce works conditioned to some extent by previous literary representations. Such a dynamic, whereby one text becomes the model for another in a continuing process, also figures in the depiction of the Caucasian landscape by Russians, starting with Gavrila Derzhavin. Most Russian mountain poetry is concentrated in the 1820s, when a conception of the southern borderland as sublime wilderness was firmly established by Aleksandr Pushkin in Kavkazskii plennik and then elaborated in verse by such secondary writers as K. F. Ryleev, S. D. Nechaev, V N. Grigor'ev, and V G. Tepliakov.

Some of the few moments of comic relief to be found in Muscovite historical texts are provided in Grigorii Karpovich Kotoshikhin's description of the Muscovite government. Kotoshikhin was an undersecretary (pod'iachii) of the Foreign Affairs Bureau (Posol'skii prikaz) who defected to Sweden and in 1666-1667 wrote an account of Muscovy's court and administration. He is the source of the dubious assertion that the tsar's daughters (tsarevny) were not married outside the country because they were stupid and illiterate and would bring shame on the tsar's family. Kotoshikhin also relates a comical episode in which a leading boyar refused to sit at a banquet next to a man he considered his social inferior. The protesting boyar was forcibly held at his assigned place while he kicked and screamed and finally wriggled out of the grasp of the tsar's attendants and slid under the table, rather than sit by a demeaning dinner partner.

The drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture in the winter of 1930 was “spontaneous“ (stikhiinyi) in the extreme. Spontaneous, in this context, is not a synonym for voluntary; instead, it denotes the process by which collectivization was implemented from January to March 1930. This process was characterized by a deficit in organization and order, a revolutionary impulsiveness tempered by neither law nor legality, and, perhaps most of all, “teleological planning“ based on constant upward revisions of numerical indicators as plans and directives were passed down the hierarchical chain of regional command. Central control, in the traditional sense, was nonexistent or ineffective; control, central or otherwise, seemingly so pervasive in “Stalinist” collectivization, is simply a misnomer for the arbitrary coercion that prevailed at the time and was predicated, in large part, upon the very absence of such control.

Ever since its publication the success of Fedor Dostoevskii's first novel Poor Folk has been ascribed primarily to the characterization of its “naturalistic” hero, Makar Devushkin, not to its sentimental heroine, Varen'ka Dobroselova. Although critics have continued to discover new merits in Poor Folk, in the end it is Devushkin who dominates the novel and on whom, in one way or another, most of its virtues depend. Not only is Devushkin the protagonist, he is also at the center of the novel's important innovations in style, theme, and characterization. Dostoevskii took the poor copying clerk, a type that for a decade had been used as a stock device—and most often the butt—of Russian comic fiction, and transformed him into the hero of a tragi-comic sentimental novel. This transformation was much abetted by Dostoevskii's use of the epistolary form— a form common to the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, but long outdated in Russia by the 1840s—for it permitted the hero to tell his own story and, by so doing, to reveal the sensitive human being behind the comic mask.

A directory of all archives and manuscript repositories in the USSR with a comprehensive bibliography of finding aids has long been needed by researchers. Yet one of the most highly centralized, state-run archival systems in the world, with its subsidiary strong publication division under the world's first specialized research institute for archival affairs, has still not seen fit to provide researchers with such a basic reference aid. Now, significantly not from Moscow but from the western Ukrainian center of Lviv, comes the second edition of a research handbook of all-union scope that more closely approaches that optimal directory than any other single volume available. The expanded second edition still does not cover all repositories by any means, or even all of the largest and most important manuscript-holding institutions in some areas. Its bibliography remains far from comprehensive and is awkwardly presented.