State and Revolution has long seemed to be the most puzzling of Lenin's written works. The traditional view among western scholars has regarded State and Revolution as a Utopian fantasy that is completely out of character with the rest of Lenin's thought. The most prominent exponent of that viewpoint is Robert V. Daniels, who, in an influential article published in 1953, asserted that the ideas of State and Revolution were “permeated with an idealistic, almost Utopian spirit“ and who in a later work described State and Revolution as an “argument for Utopian anarchism” and a treatise in “revolutionary utopianism.“ Similar comments have been offered by a number of other authors. Alfred Meyer, though not dealing in detail with State and Revolution in his brilliant review of Lenin's thought, regards the essay as a reflection of the “dream of the ‘commune state'“ expressed in Lenin's statements from early 1917 through the first few months of 1918.

During the first months after the October Revolution, Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors who had supported the overthrow of the Provisional Government in the name of soviet power—power to ordinary citizens exercised through democratically operated Soviets—participated in revolutionary politics most actively and directly through city and district Soviets. The lowest rungs on the ladder of democratic councils established throughout much of urban Russia after the fall of the tsar, these Soviets became the new regime's primary institutions of urban local government. Their early history reveals much about the extent to which the revolutionary ideal of popular grass-roots democracy was attempted and realized at that time, as well as about the first stages of the process by which that ideal was undermined and Bolshevik party-controlled authoritarianism became irreversibly entrenched. This history can be illustrated by close examination of the evolution of one Petrograd district soviet—that of the First City District— between November 1917 and the full explosion of the civil war crisis in June 1918.

Russian formalism has been of interest in the west for at least three decades since the publication of Victor Erlich's authoritative study of the school in 1954. Almost every year significant new contributions are made to the analysis of the formalists’ scholarship; their multiplex theory, with all of its different, and at times seemingly contradictory, aspects, is elucidated, and many of these aspects are successfully incorporated in modern criticism and literary theory in the west. I will not dwell upon the better known “internalist” aspects of the formalists' work, nor will I try to summarize their theory. Several leading members of the school systematically attempted to create a coherent theoretical framework for the sociology of literature. In this article I will look at the sociology of the Russian formalists from the point of view of a sociologist, analyze it, and suggest that the formalist sociology of literature makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of literature, but also to the understanding of social reality and to the discipline of sociology.

On 23 April 1873, the peasant Kuz'ma Rudchenko was found near the village of Brusovka. His head was completely crushed, his hands had been chopped off, and the plank that had been used to beat him had been thrust through his anus, piercing the full length of his body and extruding from his gaping mouth. In 1881, in the village of Mukhovitsie, Kiev province, peasants apprehended a thief and sliced the tendons in his right leg and left hand. In the same year and province, in the village of Iazvinkie, the peasants carved a special toothed stake, so that it resembled a series of arrowheads on one shaft. They then shoved it up the rectum of a suspected thief, with the arrows positioned so that he could not remove it.

“If one were to write a Russian Tarzan and place him entirely within present-day Russian conditions,” Viktor Shklovskii asserted in the midst of the veritable Tarzan “craze” that swept across the Soviet Union during the early 1920s, “he would probably not prove to be successful.” Long before Edgar Rice Burroughs's popular series of Tarzan novels was ever published, however, a nineteenth century Russian tale had already treated this same theme of the child who, having been raised among apes in the jungle, returns to civilization to face the dilemma of choosing between two vastly different cultures: the comfortable but corrupt society of men or the company of primitive but noble and loving beasts.

Writing from Italy in the summer of 1904, the noted jurist V. D. Spasowicz lamented the assassination of the minister of interior V. K. Pleve: “The news of the catastrophe with Pleve has reached us … I regard it … as a pity because at least under him the Polish question could be raised.“

Spasowicz spoke with authority on the Polish question. Himself a Pole, he had closely observed the painful evolution of the issue for fifty years. It was not only a difficult issue to raise, but defenders of Poland in Russian society were rare. The same was true of the Russian press where few publications were willing to support the Poles. The prominent liberal journal Vestnik Evropy, for which Spasowicz himself wrote, was an exception. After 1871 it emerged as a critic of the government's program of Russification in the Congress Kingdom.