Sandler analyzes the poetry of three contemporary Russian women poets, focusing on one poem by each poet from the late Soviet period. Using psychoanalytical theory and philosophical theories of the sublime, she assesses how fear creates a sense of self for each poet. In all the texts examined, the poet's self is shattered in order to be built up again. Poetic identity means a writer's identity, particularly to Sedakova and Lisnianskaia, and all three poets find a sense of self by resisting some conventional notions of the woman poet.

This paper investigates the ramifications of the garden trope, as Catherine the Great and Grigorii Potemkin applied it to the Crimea after Russia's annexation in 1783. Schönle argues that Catherine conceived of the province as a kind of garden and that she did so in order to bolster the identification of the Crimea with the garden of Eden and thus appeal to the paradise myth that became an intrinsic part of Russia's ideology of imperial power. The Crimean garden was meant to exemplify the benefits of her loving and protective rule, one that enables multicultural coexistence, eschews the risks of assimilationist imperial policies, and yet brings about a moral transformation of the subjugated population. In both its physical and ethnic geography, the Crimean garden claims universality in that it foregrounds an eclectic diversity of species and peoples. Catherine ascribed religious overtones to the garden trope, and she did so in opposition to a western Enlightenment definition of empire and civility.

In this article, Dunning challenges traditional scholarship concerning the identity and character of Tsar Dmitrii (reigned 1605-06), better known as the “False Dmitrii“—the only tsar ever raised to the Russian throne by means of a military campaign and popular uprisings. Usually dismissed as a frivolous impostor who was despised by his subjects for being a tool of Polish intervention in Russia’s Time of Troubles, Tsar Dmitrii turns out to have been a charismatic, well-educated warrior-prince who was revered by many of his subjects. Furthermore, he truly believed that he was the youngest son of Ivan die Terrible. This article deconstructs the legends and scholarship identifying Tsar Dmitrii as the lascivious and bloodthirsty monk-sorcerer, Grishka Otrep’ev and demonstrates that the faulty image of Tsar Dmitrii has been shaped by historians’ overreliance on folklore and on the propaganda manufactured by Dmitrii’s enemies. Dunning calls for a new biography of this mysterious and controversial ruler.

Sexual exchanges between men in modernizing Russia can be a window on the comparatively unexplored problem of Russian masculinities. Traditional forms of mutual male intimacy occurred within the patriarchal structures of gentry and merchant households, workshops and bathhouses. Arteli of peasant bathhouse attendants engaged in “sodomy” with clients, observing customary work practices (zemliachestvo, krugovaia poruka). By the 1890s an urban sexual marketplace characterized Russia's male homosexual subculture. Sexually knowing youths and men systematically offered sex for cash to “pederasts”, or tetki, who were perceived as predominantly attracted to men. After 1917, Bolsheviks evaluated same-sex love not through a single prism but by class and national contexts. Russia's male homosexual subculture was mistrusted in part because it was a clandestine sexual market, creating suspicious dependency relationships and threatening the “purity” of “innocent” young men.

Based on fieldwork (primarily in southern Romania), this article treats identity-construction among professional male Romani musicians, investigating in particular the discourse that they generate as they maintain their exclusive vocational niche on the boundaries of intersecting ethnic communities. Seeking to establish the influence of Romani musicians as agents in the construction of their own identity, Beissinger discusses notions that Romani musicians provide of non-Roms and other Roms (including other musicians), as well as how they portray surrounding cultural and political phenomena as expressions of their syncretic occupational and ethnic sense of self. Beissinger argues that Romani musicians are unquestionably enclosed by socially inflicted boundaries but are themselves also agents of boundary-making as they articulate connections with and distinctions from the world around them. Throughout, she draws pertinent comparisons with Romani musicians in other east European countries.

The “other archipelago” of “special setdements” was a cornerstone of the evolving gulag (Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei) order. Scholars have paid relatively scant attention to the special settlements, which emerged first to isolate and exploit the labor of the dekulakized peasantry and within a short time would house a variety of other state-defined social and ethnic aliens through the course of the Stalin years. This article explores the history of the other archipelago in the year 1930, its founding and perhaps most difficult year, focusing on the NortiV ern Region. It was here that the state chose to send over a quarter of a million peasants, the single largest contingent of dekulakized peasant families in 1930. Against this icy backdrop, the special setders—men, women, and children—built the villages of the other archipelago within the wilderness.

This article focuses on Soviet policy toward genealogically defined identity groups in the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan. For Soviet authorities, kinship loyalties were problematic chiefly because they hindered the emergence of class consciousness among the Turkmen. Soviet officials pursued two essentially contradictory policies in their attempt to eliminate “tribalism” in the Turkmen republic. First, they sought to undermine the economic basis of genealogical affiliation by dismantling the existing system of collective land tenure. Second, they devised a policy of “tribal parity”, which attempted to suppress kin-based conflict by guaranteeing fair and equal treatment for all genealogical groups. Instead of allowing class consciousness to supplant kinship loyalties, however, Soviet rule tended to increase the salience of distinctions based on genealogy. Because of the close linkage between genealogy and socioeconomic standing in Turkmenistan, Soviet attempts to foment class conflict inadvertently exacerbated descent group conflict.

This article aims to identify prevalent concerns and anxieties informing Berberova's works, whether designated as fiction, biography, fictionalized history, or autobiography; to observe what is hidden behind the public facade of the autobiographical self; and to determine how the fictional and the autobiographical are connected in the writer's narratives. Berberova's autobiography, as well as her fictional and biographical writings, provide a fertile ground for investigating the author's frame of reference from the point of view of her gender. A close look at the nature of autobiography, with its careful construction of a public self, offers insight into the way Berberova wants others to see her. Paying attention to the struggle for physical and spiritual survival, the focus of Berberova's writing in general, affords an understanding of what the author deems necessary in order to overcome the hardships of emigration, the challenges of failed relationships, and the hazards of being a woman writer. Berberova's connections with men and women in her life—described by herself, seen by others, reflected in her fiction—all point to a pivotal concern with the strengths and weaknesses of her own gender.

The return of the first wave émigrés' cultural legacy at a critical juncture of postcommunist transformation in 1990s Russia presents a case study of a dialogue between the diaspora and the homeland. The belated encounter of shared national traditions reveals a history of competing cultural monopolies, incongruous resemblances, and matching nostalgias. Contemporary diaspora and postcolonial studies in the west have addressed such key issues as diaspora's self-definition in relation to the homeland, its strategies of resistance and accommodation, and transnational networks. The first part of the article presents a brief survey of Russia Abroad, its internal discourse concerning its legacy and the dream of return after losif Stalin's death. The second part considers the emerging field of diaspora studies in Russia, focusing on the dynamics of its reception, appropriation, and domestication. The range of partisan responses to the émigré legacy is considered a touchstone for the current debates concerning Russian national and cultural identity.

Focusing on the funerals of two populist political prisoners, this article examines how Petersburg's radical youth expropriated an allegedly unchanging, sacred ritual to extend the parameters of public discussion and social critique in late imperial Russia. Drawing on their experiences of Russia's religious and revolutionary past, the youth who accompanied their peers to the grave used the special, “sacred” time and space effected by the performance of customary burial rituals to offer their fellow citizens revolutionary alternatives to the existing regime.

The article examines the controversial book AZ i IA (1975) by the Russian-language Kazakh writer Olzhas Suleimenov. Ostensibly a study of the Russian medieval classic The Song of Igor's Campaign, the book was quickly understood to be a pointed commentary on the history of Russo-Turkic relations and a vindication of the Central Asian nomads, who were seen as oppressed by imperial domination in the field of knowledge no less than in politics. While Soviet critics noted the tension between the book's scholarly premises and its ideological claims, they chose to ignore the deeper implications of AZ I IA as a hybrid genre that conflates the devices of poetry with the scholarly methods of historiography and linguistics. While earlier critics chose to hail or dismiss Suleimenov's ideas on the basis of their scientific accuracy, this article interprets his poetics and ideology as characteristic of a “Eurasianist” tradition in Soviet letters, represented in this case by the linguist N. Ia. Marr and the avant-garde poet Velimir Khlebnikov, both of whom can be said to anticipate essential aspects of Suleimenov's linguistic vision and epistemological orientation.

In his 1876 Writer’s Diary, novelist Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii wrote a series of three journalistic articles parodying both the contemporary movement of modern spiritualism and its principal critic in St. Petersburg, noted chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev. This article explores Dostoevskii’s views on spiritualism and examines the rhetorical strategy he developed to help persuade Russians away from what he perceived as a dangerous mystical fad. Mendeleev had similar goals, but the two differed on the urgency of the problem—and hence the proper rhetoric for the task—and thus both spent as much time fighting the other as the movement they deplored. This article endeavors both to analyze a Russian scientific text alongside works traditionally considered more “rhetorical“ and to explore in detail the specific involvement of Dostoevskii the journalist with contemporary issues in Russian culture.