In 1817, Russian authorities apprehended six Tatar brigands in the port town of Feodosiia in the Crimea. Convicted of murdering seventeen people and of stealing from and desecrating a Christian church, the six were sentenced in April by the local civil and criminal court to punishment by knout–the harshest instrument of corporal punishment used in Russia. The knout consisted of a stiff thong of rawhide fastened by a bronze ring to a braided leather whip of approximately three and a half feet in length; this apparatus was attached to a wooden stick of two and a half feet that the executioner wielded. Following the knouting, the court authorized the executioner to rip out the nostrils and brand the faces of the Tatars, who were then to be dispatched into eternal exile at hard labor in the mines of eastern Siberia. Because the local court deemed these criminals especially dangerous, and because their apprehension and conviction ostensibly reinforced Russian leadership in the province, the court decreed that the knouting of the criminals be carried out in a variety of locations across the province, rather than in a single place.

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.

On the eve of World War I the St. Petersburg Public Library acquired, from an anonymous donor, 124 letters from V. P. Turgeneva to her son, Ivan Sergeevich, written from 1838 to 1844. His side of the correspondence is not extant, but his youthful personality is often vividly evoked by his mother’s words, and his letters are reflected and occasionally quoted in hers. These letters from the hand of V. P. would comprise, an archivist once observed, a thick book.1 During the era they represent, I. S. (“Milyi drug i syn, Vanichka,” somewhat more frequently “Mon cher Jean”) entered Berlin University to study philosophy, traveled in Europe, published twenty short poems and the comic verse narrative Parasha, met Vissarion Belinskii and became his friend, began his lifelong friendship with the Viardots, was first stricken with gallstones and other complaints, published his first story (already mature and polished, “Andrei Kolosov“), and wrote part of a work of fiction now seen as a key to his creativity (“Perepiska,” published in 1856).

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.

Lev Tolstoi had originally intended to open Anna Karenina with a scene in Princess Betsy’s salon, later moved to part 2 of the novel, in which the work’s central themes are all touched on in the conversation of the gathered guests. This introductory discussion primarily concerns illicit liaisons, but alongside the talk of adultery, one guest states, “The theme is everything. Once one has a theme, it is easy to embroider on it” (121). These words obliquely acknowledge a debt to one of the novel’s sources, Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” a story about improvisation in which that art is conceived not merely as the instantaneous or impromptu invention we usually think of, but even more importantly as the appropriation of someone else’s topic. Anna Karenina, and some of Tolstoi’s later works as well, make important borrowings from Pushkin’s story about borrowing, employing both themes from “Egyptian Nights” and therefore the methods of the Italian improvisor in it.

Pictures, so the first Bolsheviks believed, speak louder than words. Visual propaganda was essential in their campaign to reach the illiterate and poorly literate masses, to engage them in a new Soviet style of life. By the end of the civil war, every leading member of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party valued the political uses of film. As commissar of nationalities, Iosef Stalin recognized its potential; in his simple expression, film was “the greatest means of mass agitation.” Like cinema, the Bolsheviks appeared at the confluence of two worlds, the traditional and the modern. For them, film was the perfect medium by which to critique the old and celebrate the new. Film viewed the world as they did, with one measure of hard realism, another of soft utopianism.

Barrels roll. In a mythological, folk, or literary text, they set off a reciprocal dynamic of emptying out and filling in. Where Diogenes filled his barrel with his own cynical self, Francois Rabelais removed him, then poured back in the wine drained off to accommodate his asceticism. On the basis of this example, Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrates the need to re-embody the disembodied; in connection with the folk laughter that replenishes the hollow chill of mortality, he notes that Rabelais celebrated the “cheerful death” of the Duke of Clarence in a barrel full of malmsey. In Vladimir Propp’s analysis of myth, folktales, and initiation rites, barrels stand in for the bellies of great fish; these swallow and then regurgitate the hero, supplying in the interim “temporary death,” mystic instruction, and the makings of a leader or a savior of the people. It is in an ocean-going barrel that Aleksandr Pushkin’s Prince Gvidon, condemned to an infant death, grows “not by days, but by hours” (“Skazka o tsare Saltane” [Tale of Tsar Saltan, 1831]), repeating the pattern of reversals in birth dreams, through exposure on the water and entombment in womb-like receptacles, studied by Otto Rank. Il'ia Erenburg’s apostle of absolute and universal negation had planned to start his mission by crossing the Atlantic in a beer barrel (Julio Jurenito, 1922). The dual or schizophrenic narrator of Sasha Sokolov’s Shkola dlia durakov (School for fools, 1976), though otherwise anonymous, is moved to fill his mentor’s barrel with his own singular name.

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 headline in the 15 August 1937 issue of the Great Falls Tribune proclaimed, “Montana Families Have Their Own Colony in Poland.” This colony of eight American families constituted the upper management of the Giesche Mining Company of Katowice, Silesia. Owned by Americans since 1926, the Giesche Company was Poland's largest zinc mining company and one of Poland's largest coal producers. The newspaper article described the beautiful wooded site where the Americans lived, the nearby golf course, the good winter skiing, the numerous Hollywood films available at the local movie house, and the Americans' Polish language lessons.

Among the most prominent generic signals of Dostoevskii’s The Possessed are those suggesting allegory. Allegory is one of several genres in the novel referred to by name. The narrator characterizes Stepan Trofimovich’s romantic poema as “some sort of allegory” (9) and remarks that, after the most intimate of encounters with his patroness, Stepan Trofimovich would sometimes “jump up from the couch and beat the wall with his fists,” all of which “without the slightest allegory“ (12). Concerning the climax of Iuliia Mikhailovna’s soirée, an allegorical representation of the various literary schools and tendencies of the day, the narrator reports, “It would have been difficult to imagine a more pitiful, tactless, talentless, and vapid allegory than that ‘literary quadrille’” (389). On a more fundamental level, the work’s second epigraph, the passage from the Gospel of Luke describing the exorcism of a possessed man and the flight of the demons into a herd of swine, provides an allegorical foundation for the entire action, projecting the work against biblical history.

The mute scene at the end of Nikolai GogoFs comedy The Inspector General has been described as apocalyptic, metapoetic, and pictorial. It begins when the gendarme announces the arrival of the real inspector general to the town’s corrupt officials: their horrified expressions create a protracted, silent tableau, and the audience (having been told in the play’s epigraph and the mayor’s aside that they are looking at their own “crooked mugs”) is left to stare back at the players for ninety seconds. Gogol' expected this scene to be a transformative moment for all of Russia. But exactly how he meant for the tableau to set up a moral-aesthetic event has never been adequately explained.

As some critics have noted, for Gogol' images of viewers looking at paintings are a means of commenting on the potential power of art over the human soul.

The All-Union Congress of Soviets ratified the Constitution of the USSR on 31 January 1924 and, according to traditional narratives, brought the formation of the Soviet Union to a close. The very same day, a group of leading ethnographers met at the Academy of Sciences in Petrograd to discuss a directive they had received from the Soviet of Nationalities: define nationality, determine “rational criteria” for classifying the population in the first All-Union Census, and notify the Central Statistical Administration as soon as possible. The legal formation of the Soviet Union had been completed, but the state-building process, which involved “re-imagining” the former Russian empire as a socialist federation of nationalities, was just getting under way. This essay argues that the classification of Soviet citizens by nationality in the All-Union Censuses of 1926, 1937, and 1939 was a fundamental component of the creation of the multinational state. The very establishment of the census category nationality marked a critical break with the tsarist regime, which had categorized its subjects on the basis of religion and native language. Ethnographers, statisticians, and linguists from Minsk to Vladivostok who formulated questionnaires and drew up lists of nationalities for all three censuses used their expertise to divine order out of chaos and create a new definitional grid. Not only did they have to decide which tribes, clans, and peoples belonged to which nationality, they also had to figure out what “nationality” meant.

Between 1991 and 1996 Russia underwent a precipitous economic and social decline with decreases in production, gross national product, and wages, and increases in inequality, crime, and corruption. Most people experienced a decline in their standard of living, and many fondly recalled the security and stability of the communist era. Nevertheless, in the two main cases when the Russian electorate was confronted with a choice of directions in economic policy–the referendum of 1993 and the presidential elections of 1996–the majority chose reform. Writing about Boris Yeltsin's surprising victory in the 1996 presidential elections, a Pravda commentator mused: “Logically, he should have lost, since he was unable to fully solve any of the problems that have piled up: the stagnation of production, the impoverishment of a majority of the people, growing unemployment, the chronic nonpayment of wages, the decline in science, culture and education, the continuing conflict in Chechnya, etc. Nevertheless, Yeltsin received a majority of the electorate's votes.”

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!“