Boris Eikhenbaum spent nearly a decade working within Opoiaz, the Petersburg branch of Russian formalism, to develop a work-centered poetics. Faced with the inadequacy of traditional mimetic, expressive, and pragmatic views of literature, he and his colleagues tried to address literary works without recourse to extraliterary facts. Any intrinsic poetics, however, encounters difficulties, for it must avoid even the most obvious cultural and historical explanations of any work taken as literary. In its struggle against crudely reductive interpretations of literature, Opoiaz had constantly to guard against sliding back into an external approach. This article will suggest that it was largely Eikhenbaum who played the role of guard dog, nudging the evolving Opoiaz view of literature back toward the literary work itself. How successful he was in this effort (and by extension, perhaps, the successes and shortcomings of workcentered literary theories in general) is the question to be examined here. Eikhenbaum's own shift, beginning in 1927, toward a study of literature that privileges the author, may tell us as much about the limitations of objective theories of literature as about the political inadmissibility of Russian formalism under Stalin.

While it is never wise to read the Vitae sanctorum as strictly historical accounts, we must be cognizant of the medieval hagiographers' frequent efforts to transform political history into theological and spiritual history. Thus did the authors and redactors of the vaiious texts concerning saints Boris and Gleb seek to project a piously viable and ideologically useful Christian argument for the sanctity of these princes who had perished in the course of the protracted civil war following the death of Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich of Kiev (d. 1015).

In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place." Freidin's richly suggestive remark hints at both the nature of and the reasons for Mandel'shtam's "orphandom," and the means by which he sought to surmount or circumvent his pervasive homelessness and achieve a "homeland, a house, a hearth" in culture.

The most vulnerable member of the peasant household was reported to be the soldatka, the soldier's wife. The quintessential outsider in a community based on married couples, the soldatka suffered from the general coldness of the village toward single women. Stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, she was seen as a loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children. We know little about her. Popular imagination has been informed largely by the soldatka's plaintive voice in folk "recruit" laments. Historians have paid scant attention to the marginal members of peasant society. Yet focusing on the weaker persons in the peasant household provides insight into little-known subjects: family antagonisms, interpersonal relationships, and the status of women.

For well over a century scholars with a variety of concerns have inquired into the level of literacy in pre-Petrine Russia with mixed success at best. The problem is well known: The array of sources upon which historians of other cultures typically rely to estimate levels of literacy–parish records, wills, service records, and tax lists–either do not exist for pre–Petrine Russia or do not provide the volume of data necessary for computing literacy in a statistically meaningful way.

One remarkable feature of the 1905 Russian Revolution was the efflorescence of labor organizations that occurred throughout the urban regions of the empire. Many workers throughout the empire demonstrated their resolve to promote and defend their interests in an organized and rational manner, with the mass labor movement often cutting across craft and occupational divisions to bring all kinds of workers into joint economic and political action against both employer and autocracy. As 1905 progressed the political radicalization of urban workers inspired much of the opposition movement that nearly brought the government to its knees. As several United States historians have recently shown, in 1905 organized labor, particularly trade unions, entered the political arena as a potent force, with workers simultaneously demanding individual rights of citizenship and collective rights of association.

In both the west and the Soviet Union the reputation of the late lurii Trifonov has come to rest principally on the candor with which his works, particularly those of his Moscow cycle, examine ethical themes. To non-Soviet scholars Trifonov offers the appealing biography of a writer who, having begun his career with a Stalinist novel (Studenty, 1950), nonetheless welcomed the Thaw (Utolenie zhazhdy, 1963) and then evolved into a chronicler of the moral decline into which Soviet society was sliding under Leonid Brezhnev.

How deep and how long-lasting Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms will be remains an open question. Obstacles to the realization of some of his goals may be built into Soviet life. Soviet resources may limit economic development; industrial managers (however willing they may be) may lack the knowledge and skills necessary to operate in a market environment and continuing state orders may absorb the productive capacity of the factories and may limit the extent to which they can respond to market forces.

In October 1985, when I first began research on the case of Academician Luzin, rumors had surfaced in the Soviet Union that new official regulations would require scientific articles containing no classified information to be published in Soviet journals before they could be cleared for publication abroad. The rumors were true. The effect of these new regulations clearly resembled the campaign against the mathematician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, which had taken place fifty years before. Luzin was the victim of the first Soviet mass media campaign against such publication. The case against him appears to be an insignificant moment in the witch-hunting mania of the 1930s, since the propaganda was apparently aimed only at one full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and his alleged misconduct.