It is an established fact that the so-called "Southern" (mainly Odessabased) school of writers enriched Soviet literature of the 1920s with a number of "European" dimensions neglected by the then dominant Russian realist tradition, such as (to name but a few) intertextuality, a focus on language and style, and a sharpened sensitivity to plot and composition. It can be said that in Babel' criticism some of these aspects are just beginning to receive the full measure of attention that they merit. However, the rich fabric of Russian and western cultural subtexts in Babel''s prose and its intricate relationships with various literary and mythological prototypes remain largely unexplored. Among recent studies that begin to fill this gap, the forthcoming monograph in Russian by Yampolsky and Zholkovsky deserves special mention as one of the most comprehensive to date.

The Stalinist revolution began to accelerate in Poland, as throughout eastern Europe, in 1947, with the implementation of multi-year plans, the repression of opposition and the enforcement of unity in the bloc; by the beginning of 1950, the transformation of the bloc was more or less complete. The construction of the Stalinist system did not occur in a vacuum but was shaped in part by societies, and the regimes which emerged were thus more complex than has been generally acknowledged. That complexity stems in part from Stalinist regimes’ interest in transforming society through mobilization and integration, rather than merely subduing it. Active participation in political and economic life was required; mere acquiescence to the demands of the regime was insufficient; and class conflict was to be eliminated, replaced by an alliance between the working class and its former adversaries.

The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-1 September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine's Instruction to her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such as Pravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of Stalinist policies.

The east European communist regimes, in contrast to their frequently repeated claims, not only did not weed out nationalism in their domains but in some cases attempted to manipulate and exploit it for their own purposes. Nonetheless, since the collapse of communism the region has experienced a robust resurgence of at times violent ethnic conflicts and racism explained by the simultaneous occurrence of several factors accompanying the postcommunist transition process

Like other multinational states in Europe, from the middle of the nineteenth century the Russian Empire found itself confronted, indeed threatened, by the growing strength of non-Russian national movements. Unlike other contemporary national “awakenings,” however, the Polish question in the Russian Empire had roots extending beyond the eighteenth century and posed, at least in the minds of Russian administrators, a serious and persistent threat to Russian national interests in the empire’s vulnerable western borderlands. From the 1830s an anti-Polish policy had been pursued in these areas, but only after the 1863 uprising did the Russian imperial state dedicate itself to a policy of radical elimination of Polish influence in the so-called “western provinces,” a fusion (sliianie) of these territories with the Russian interior in terms of administration, economy, culture and nationality.

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

The sage of Yasnaya Polyana haunted Babel'‘s imagination as a paragon of professional greatness: "What Tolstoy knows and may do–may we do that? You read Tolstoy and it seems: one more…page and you'll finally understand the secret of life…After you know what Tolstoy thinks of death, there is no reason to know what a Fedor Sologub thinks on this issue." In an early story ("Inspiration," 1917) the young narrator says to his friend, a would-be literary genius: "Well, Leo Tolstoy [Lev Nikolaevich], when you write your autobiography, remember me" (1966: 32). Living at one time near a stud farm in Molodenovo, Babel' cultivated the acquaintance of an aged local horseman.

Historians have not been at their finest in attempting to measure standard of living, and late imperial rural Russia is no exception. Given the absence of reliable measures for personal or household income or even of real wage trends—the most common proxy for the standard of living—scholars have been forced to employ a variety of other surrogates, often with unfortunate results. For Russia, recourse has been made to peasant tax arrears, mass consumption of “luxury” or nonfood items, and rye-wages. Shifts in the size of land allotments, numbers of livestock and patterns of land tenure often have been the focus of study; others have emphasized trends in net national product, grain retained in the village or grain yields generally. Diet has been assessed both quantitatively, in terms of caloric intake or protein derived from meat products, and qualitatively, underscoring harvest variability. Still other studies have looked at population trends, at times addressing the malthusian dilemma and suggesting that Russia was overpopulated. And frustration has recently led one historian to suggest we give up.

“Lyric dialogism” is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, “Slovo v romane” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently “monologic,” as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel. He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century. On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry.

Not since the early eighteenth century, when the Moldovan prince Dimitrie Cantemir was the toast of salon society from Berlin to St. Petersburg, has the existence of a Moldovan state been as widely recognized by the international community.1 Moldova's exit from the Soviet Union on 27 August 1991 and its entry into the United Nations the following year, though, raised the difficult question of the republic's future orientation.

To begin, three encounters, and then some ruminations about two deaths, the veiling of identity and the expression of kinship. The encounters are from the diary Isaac Babel' kept during his service with Budenny's First Cavalry Army in the Polish campaign of 1920; the deaths are those that frame the work of fiction he drew from this experience, Red Cavalry. That book begins and ends with the narrator contemplating a corpse–in each instance, the body of a Jewish man whose passing leads the narrator to confront the meanings of kinship and loss. In the first case, he witnesses bereavement; in the second, he experiences it. On one important level, the narrator's trajectory in Red Cavalry is captured in the contrast between his links to the first death and to the last. Reading the story cycle against the background of the diary, one can see this feature of the cycle's design in terms of the central dilemma for Babel' (bearing papers in the name of Kirill Vasilievich Liutov, the name he bequeathes to his narrator) in his dealings with the civilians of the heavily Jewish towns through which his division passed: whether or not to reveal that he was himself a Jew.