There is little to debate about the nature of Serbian political life since the mid-1980s—it has been highly nationalized, to the point that one can argue that a consensus existed among Serbian public figures that the Serbs' very existence was threatened by their neighbors. This consensus links political, cultural, and intellectual elites regardless of their ideological background. It draws together figures representing great diversity in Serbia. This powerful movement has usually been either dismissed or demonized: dismissed as superficial, the product of the cynical adaptation of politicians to new times, or demonized as something inherent in Serbian political culture, a historically predetermined mind-set, ancient and therefore ineradicable. But there is too much evidence that nationalism in Serbia is neither superficial nor ancient. What of the large number of Serbian intellectual and cultural figures who traversed the path from socialism to nationalism after 1945? Were they collectively one of the most cynical generations in any society's modern history, or were they simply possessed by the ancient demons of Serbian nationalism? Neither explanation is satisfying. Instead, postwar Serbian nationalism began as a legitimate and humane movement, neither incomprehensible nor artificial, and it should be understood in the context of communism's effect on Serbian society and its failure to fulfill its own promises, particularly to bring modernization and a universal culture to the peoples of Yugoslavia.

From Prague to Ulan Bator, the decade since 1989 has witnessed a revolution both deep and broad. It was simultaneously a national revolution that created new nation-states, a political revolution that sundered the most fully institutionalized authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century, and an economic revolution that replaced administered systems of production and distribution with markets. Separate national, democratic, and capitalist revolutions that had rocked western European countries in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries swept almost in an instant across nine countries that quickly became twenty-eight.

Scholars generally agree on the relationship between the physical stature, or height, of children and adults, and their quality of life, or their biological status, including diet, illnesses, intensity and conditions of work, availability of medical care, living conditions, psychological well-being, climate, water, air, and other environmental factors that have impinged on their lives prior to the point at which their height is measured. Genetic factors have an important effect on individual height, but genetic distinctions lose their significance when masses of individuals are measured and average heights are compared. The same effect holds at the level of entire populations: differences in height are determined, not by ethnic or racial attributes, but by living conditions.

There were two good reasons to expect that developments after socialism, whether in the former Soviet Union or in east central Europe, would follow a roughly similar course. The first was the homogenizing effects of the socialist experience. In contrast to other regions of the world, such as Latin America and southern Europe, where dictatorships had also given way to more liberalized orders, the socialist regimes of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were remarkably alike in their form and functioning.

Assessing the change in the level of Soviet welfare in the first half of the twentieth century presents many problems. There are the problems associated with the reliability and accessibility of Soviet statistics, and there are those associated with the problem of understanding the peculiar nature of the Soviet situation in which a trend toward rapid secular improvements in welfare and life expectancy were accompanied by massive shortterm welfare and mortality crises. These problems are made even more complicated by the intense politicization of this question. In this paper I address all of these problems.

Among the guiding preoccupations of postcommunist Latvia and its east European neighbors is the desire to be “normal.” A unifying notion in the period of opposition to Soviet communism, “normality” became a site of political contestation after the restoration of independence in Latvia. The fields of political and social life have been dominated by two competing narratives of normality: temporal normality, a restorationist narrative that elevates the experiences and institutions of independent interwar Latvia as a model for postcommunist change, and spatial normality, which takes the western (European) road of capitalist modernity as a map for the future. Although frequently at odds with one another in the field of political life, the temporal and spatial narratives share a nation-centered orientation that both reinforces and, arguably, expands women's subjugated status in society and submerges the “woman question” beneath the "national question." That is to say that although women as members of the body of the citizenry share in the benefits that accrue to this group in the forms of free speech, voting rights, and the right to own property, women as women have not benefited and, in fact, have suffered the consequences of the dual trends of commodification and domestication that have accompanied, respectively, the push toward economic modernity and the elevation of tradition in social life.

The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.

Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was a landmark in the study of literature's role in shaping a society's remembrance of war. Although Fussell's book is primarily devoted to famous British poets of World War I, he stimulates thinking about the general question of how any military conflict comes to exist in the minds of civilian readers. A fascinating aspect of this immense topic concerns the power of words in the absence of images. Before newsreels and television regularly exposed civilians to scenes of carnage, writers had to rely on language to "depict" things a reader had never witnessed and probably never would. A picture can serve as a powerful substitute for seeing a massacre, and just one may leave an indelible mark. But words alone lack the stunning immediacy of visual images, an argument we can trace back to Aristotle. Verbal "depiction" is only a metaphor, as Viktor Shklovskii stressed when he asserted (with reference to suicide) that "'Blood' in poetry is not bloody." Unlike some deconstructionists, Shklovskii was not fretting about how much reality bloodshed has "prior to verbal configurations." He pinpointed instead the emotional and aesthetic detachment of readers never threatened by violence.

(And slowly, as his mind and feeling / descend into a languid dream, / Imagination takes up dealing / her motley Faro game to him.)

At a card table at the beginning of "Pikovaia dama" (The queen of spades), Tomskii recounts a tale about his flamboyant grandmother, an avid Faro player. In her youth the Countess once lost a large sum to the Duke of Orleans aujeu de laReine at Versailles. When her husband refused to pay off her debt, the Countess turned to the adventurer and wonderman Count Saint-Germain for help.

“From the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, Paul Bunyan split the atmosphere exacdy 12 feet 11 inches. His weight, he told me—and I don't doubt his word for a moment—was 888 pounds.” Together with precise measures of Paul Bunyan's hips, waist, shoulders, thighs, calves, and reach, subsequently detailed, we would, it seems, have a rather comprehensive anthropometric description of this legendary logger. But his companion, Babe the Blue Ox, “was seven axe handles wide between the eyes,” quite a different anthropometric measure indeed. Moreover, “some persons give the measurement as forty-two axe handles and a plug of Star tobacco.” And, we are told, “both figures are correct,” all of which quickly brings us to the heart of the problem, species aside.

Systemic transition in the former USSR is an inherently spatial process. In the most general sense, marketization, privatization, and internationalization involve a reordering of the political space and the restructuring of the economic and social landscapes of the former Soviet Union (FSU). In a number of more specific ways, geography also provides a structure within which individuals and institutions operate, and it provides a series of opportunities and constraints. Geographers, then, should be able to make an important contribution to debates concerning systemic change in the FSU.

In Brat'ia Karamazovy (The brothers Karamazov), Fedor Dostoevskii suggests the impossibility of earthly justice but compensates for this harsh truth through a vision of transcendent joy. His message of Christian belief, inexpressible in the indicative, infuses every word of the novel on a poetic level and becomes manifest in the unfolding of the plot.

The systematic study of the physical characteristics of human beings reaches well back into the eighteenth century. By the 1830s, scientists began to recognize that human biological outcomes were influenced, not only by inherited characteristics, but by both the natural and the socioeconomic environment. Genetic variation, by itself, did not account for the spatial, social, or temporal variation in physical stature. Only in the 1970s, however, did historians begin in earnest to explore the welfare implications of anthropometric measures. With the birth of “anthropometric history,” biological indicators, including physical stature, were used to assess the welfare of human beings as complements to such conventional indicators as income or real wages.