The evolution of Russian drama from the early twentieth century to the present day has been shaped by an alternation between censorship and relaxation, and has included exciting periods of formal innovation. The psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavskii’s stagings of Anton Chekhov’s plays was challenged by the post−1917 radicalism of Vsevolod Meierkhold, exemplified in his production of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe. Experimentation gave way to rigidity under Socialist Realism, but the post-Stalin era saw cautious innovation in playwriting succeeded by a flourishing culture of ‘director’s theatre’, led by figures such as Iurii Liubimov. Innovations gathered pace under glasnost, opening out to the bold variety of ‘New Drama’ in the twenty-first century. This has now given way to the rigid constraints imposed by the Putin regime.

This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

Over the past century there have been numerous Irish translations of literature from central and eastern European countries that are reworkings of existing English versions. This chapter focuses on examples of this phenomenon produced by three notable writers: Seamus Heaney’s work on Leoš Janáček’s song cycle, Diary of One Who Vanished (1999), Flann O’Brien’s Rhapsody in Stephen’s Green (a 1943 rendering of Karel and Josif Čapek’s Ze života hmyzu/The Insect Play), and Brian Friel’s versions of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1981/2008). The original texts have very little in common with each other, thematically or stylistically, and these translations reflect this diversity. However, they are all characterized by acts of domestication as, in a variety of ways, the three translators infused their renderings with Irish notes in order to distinguish them from the standard and British English versions that informed their creation. In this light, these translations operate almost entirely in English language and cultural terms, and speak more to the position of Irish literature in the Anglosphere than to its relationship with central and eastern European cultural worlds.

This chapter suggests that the cosmopolitanism of convicts, ex-convict settlers, and their descendants rendered penal colonies ideal places for investigations into the human sciences, and for the development of social science research methods. Administrators and visitors carried out innovative statistical and ethnographic studies in punitive locations, triangulating medical records, and anthropometric measurement with surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. The focus of attention of such research included the pathology of criminal behaviour, the social, cultural, and biological impacts of transportation, and sexuality. In some cases, it emerged out of a concern with the merits or otherwise of penal colonization. In others, it contributed to and shaped contemporary debates on race and, in the Indian context, caste. This can be seen in the analysis of the work of French naval surgeon Joseph Orgéas, in French Guiana; Anton Chekhov’s famous study of Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East; and censuses in the Andaman Islands. Finally, the chapter examines Franck Cazanove’s study of sexuality in the relégué(e) (repeat offender) settlement of Saint-Jean-du-Maroni in French Guiana. Inadvertently, though focused on ‘depravity’, it reveals much about same-sex cohabitation, marriage, and love.