Are boundaries real? This, to a certain extent, is the central question posed by The Gift when Fyodor suggests that "definitions are always finite, but I keep straining for the faraway; I search beyond the barricades (of words, of senses, of the world) for infinity, where all, all the lines meet." Written in one of the most border-conscious eras of history (the Treaty of Versailles had just created nine new independent countries and changed the boundaries of many others), Vladimir Nabokov's last complete Russian novel addresses head-on the most pressing issues he and his fellow emigres faced. Cast beyond the edge of their homeland, the exiles were forced to accept unnaturally restricted movement within Europe as well, due to their lack of a valid nationality. So one might say that for Russian exiles of the 1920s and 1930s, boundaries constituted the single most unrelenting feature of reality.

In my view, the skeptical comments of Steven L. Hoch, whether intentionally or not, undeservedly discredit human height data as an indicator of the physiological status and well-being of populations, and possibly represent the historiographical appearance of a postmodern intellectual ideology, whose representatives look with distrust on historical sources. Hoch repeats some traditional objections connected with data on height: 1) terminal height—that is, the height a person attains by the age of 20 to 25–is not a true indicator of the physiological status and well-being of a population; 2) the precision of height data falls below the standard scientific requirements for reliable indicators; 3) periodization of the dynamics of physiological status of the population and of basic data on height is impossible in principle; 4) the reasons for changes in physiological status cannot be subjected to rigorous analysis.

As is well known, "influence" studies have fallen into disrepute in recent decades in western literary criticism. Linda Hutcheon rightly points out that this development constitutes an inevitable corollary to Roland Barthes's announcement of the "death of the author" in 1968,' shifting the site of meaning away from the flesh-and-blood author onto the interaction between text and reader, placing at issue "the locus of textual appropriation.

Since 1989, the question of public values has been one of the most critical and the most controversial in the study of postcommunist politics. While there seems to be a consensus that people should accept democratic and market-based norms, there is little agreement on how much they actually do so—or on how much they need to, if markets and democracy are to survive.

As communism was collapsing, both the discipline of political science and American foreign policy were becoming captivated by two concepts—the third wave of democratization and the democratic peace. The third wave of democratization is the "worldwide movement to democracy" that occurred in more than thirty countries during the decade and a half that began with the Portuguese coup of 1974. The democratic peace is the special peace that develops among liberal states "because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics."

In his Materialy dlia biografii A. S. Pushkina, Pavel Annenkov first formulated what is now a critical commonplace: that Aleksandr Pushkin's 1816 elegies marked a turning point in the young poet's work, the rapid first steps toward poetic maturity and individuality.

Historians have had a great deal of difficulty accounting for the debacle wrought by Operation Barbarossa. How could the Red Army, a large and heavily equipped force, be so thoroughly decimated by the Wehrmacht, especially when evidence of the impending attack was plentiful? Most commonly, explanations have focused on the unexpectedly rapid success of the Blitzkrieg in western Europe, the impact of the Great Purges on the Soviet officer corps, the problems of reequipping the Red Army with modern weaponry and protecting newly expanded borders, the lack of adequate training for the rapidly growing Soviet armed forces, the confusing nature of available intelligence, and, most of all, the nearly fatal self-delusion of Iosif Stalin, which prevented the implementation of proper defensive measures. Although Stalin certainly realized that the Nazi-Soviet Pact was no more than a temporary truce and that a German attack was ultimately inevitable, he deluded himself that Adolf Hitler could be appeased until Soviet forces had grown strong enough to meet the Nazi assault. Soviet shipments of petroleum products, various raw materials, and foodstuffs were critically important to the German war machine and, thus, the key element in Stalin's strategy of appeasing Hitler.

John Komlos is one of the leading specialists on international comparative anthropometric history, and Steven L. Hoch is a leading specialist on the Russian peasantry. Their responses to my paper are a little disappointing, for they seem to have failed to grasp the main points of my argument and, despite my warnings, they have continued to view this problem from the standpoint of political interest. They both appear to be more concerned with condemning the Soviet system than with attempting to understand that system. My paper concluded by stating: “It is unfortunate that our academic debates are not used to confronting a complex situation in which secular improvements in welfare and mortality are accompanied by massive short-term crises in welfare and mortality. Instead of concentrating on the question, Who is to blame, we need to know more clearly What really happened? How large was the crisis? What factors were causing or moderating the secular trend?”

As communism was collapsing, both the discipline of political science and American foreign policy were becoming captivated by two concepts—the third wave of democratization and the democratic peace. The third wave of democratization is the "worldwide movement to democracy" that occurred in more than thirty countries during the decade and a half that began with the Portuguese coup of 1974. The democratic peace is the special peace that develops among liberal states "because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics."

Generations of Pushkinists have marveled at the writer's adroitness in adopting literary personae appropriate to a wide range of genres. His performances in social spheres, on the other hand, have elicited mixed reactions. Some contemporaries, like the censor A. V. Nikitenko, lamented Pushkin's desire to cut a figure in society rather than relying upon his artistic achievements. Others stressed his mastery of social etiquette, as well as his vanity.

The Bolshevik revolution represented a remarkable opportunity for many academics and professionals. The demands of governing a region as vast as the new Soviet state necessitated official patronage of the sciences, and the party and government provided sources of support for disciplines that had been underfunded, underdeveloped, or completely nonexistent before 1917. After the revolution, cartographers, linguists, geographers, ethnographers, social hygienists, and others found themselves the beneficiaries of a regime eager to learn about the lands that it had suddenly inherited and to spread the news of revolution to the backward peoples of the former empire. As much recent scholarship has shown, far from being the mere conduits for policies devised at the center, these specialists were professionals of variable talent and training with interests, projects, and agendas of their own. Government policy toward the nationalities, and perhaps toward scientific research in general, emerged not simply as a result of Moscow's diktat, but as a complex interplay among the center's patronage and attendant demands, the professional interests and programs of the specialists dispatched by the center, and the local interests of their colleagues and subjects in the outlying reaches of the Soviet state.

Biography would seem to be firmer ground than literary criticism: at least we like to think that biography has a factual basis in the writer's life. But of course, when we deal with biography, our sources turn out to be yet more texts (memoirs, diaries, letters, and the like), and for this reason we often discover that the documentary evidence for the writer's life is less than objective and in fact displays its own biases and is governed by its own conventions of representation.

In his celebrated "secret speech" to the delegates to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev singled out Soviet filmmakers for their part in establishing and maintaining Stalin's personality cult. Although not specifically mentioned by Khrushchev, one film has been generally identified as a prime example of the way in which those filmmakers "varnished the reality," particularly of the Soviet countryside during the Stalin period: Ivan Pyr'ev's Kubanskie kazaki (The Kuban cossacks) made in the film-famine year of 1949 and released in February 1950. But let us look at what Khrushchev actually said.

A nation's shared culture reflects its status as an "imagined community."1 Different sections of the imagined community, however, have their own ideas about what the shared culture should include and what ought to be excluded from it, and this incessant debate over the cultural canon affects the nation's sense of identity. The rise of the civil rights movement and feminism in the United States in the 1960s, for example, challenged the dominance of "dead white males" in the American literary canon. Political as much as aesthetic considerations, then, dictate what the canon of works that constitute any shared culture should include. Similarly, political circumstances often determine the "correct" interpretation of these works.