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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.