In recent years a growing body of studies has analyzed the discursive practices used by Europeans to constitute the Asian, African and American Indian as the less civilized other. A most influential contribution has been Edward Said's Orientalism. Although Said deals essentially with western responses to the Islamic east, his work contains many insights germane to nineteenth century Russian literature stimulated by tsarist expansion into the Caucasus. The Russian case, however, presents interesting variations on Said's model. Russia itself was only semi-europeanized, so that it was more problematic to build constructs of Asiatic alterity. The sense that there was no absolute division between “us” and the “Asiatics” produced extraordinarily ambivalent representations of Caucasian Muslim tribesmen in Russian literature. In “Ammalat- Bek,” for example, Alexander Marlinskii defended the tsarist conquest of the tribes as a European civilizing mission and yet expressed intense self-identification with the freedom and machismo of the Caucasian wild man.

In a footnote to her detailed commentary on the poems of Sophia Parnok (1885-1933) Sophia Poliakova states that the poet “did not make a secret of” her lesbianism and that “many of her poems are incomprehensible without knowledge of this […] extremely personal [fact].” Yet, in her otherwise excellent discussion of the poet's creative development, Poliakova does not treat the crucially important relationship between Parnok's affectional preference and her creativity which, in my opinion, played a central role in the refining of what the poet referred to as a “voice like mine.” Parnok's lesbian orientation was also partially responsible for the problems she encountered with Soviet censorship that effectively muffled her voice.

Like many other Russian women writers, Marina Tsvetaeva did not merely include women's language and physical experience in her poetry; they were central to her concern with poetry and poetic creation. These elements of her work have in recent years evoked an interest from women readers and feminist scholars of Russian literature which is reflected in the number of studies devoted to aspects of her work. Antonina Gove discusses the presence and chronological development of female roles in Tsvetaeva's poetry; Anya Kroth illustrates the importance of gender and specifically androgyny in Tsvetaeva's construction of a dichotomous world-view. Barbara Heldt's landmark study of women in Russian literature, Terrible Perfection, devotes several pages to Tsvetaeva as an autobiographer and a woman poet liberated from the “split selves” of her predecessors.

No spectacle in Soviet cities more troubled Russian and foreign observers during the 1920s than the millions of orphaned and abandoned children known as besprizornye. Whether portrayed as pitiable victims or as devious wolf-children preying on the surrounding population, they haunted the works of journalists, travelers and Communist Party members alike. “Every visitor sees it first,” a foreigner noted, “and is so shocked by the sight that the most widely known Russian youth are the … homeless children flapping along the main streets of cities and the main routes of travel like ragged flocks of animated scarecrows.” By 1922 the number of waifs reached the neighborhood of seven million, inundating cities and alarming officials that the country might soon amass enough inveterate delinquents to disrupt the socialist transformation of society.

In 1991, the Supreme Soviets of both the Soviet Union and the RSFSR approved legislation that was a decisive departure from the tentativeness about individual initiative that had characterized the Gorbachev era until then. Between January and July, a series of laws was enacted which pointedly endorsed entrepreneurship and outlined aspects of a program to remove a broad spectrum of enterprises from state control. Scholarly analysis, however, highlighted a potential obstacle to the incipient transition toward a market economy: public opinion. During the period that the 1991 laws were being enacted, most Soviet and foreign scholars studying the subject were maintaining that the Soviet people generally opposed private enterprise and that historical suspicion about capitalism would probably make the transition away from state ownership particularly difficult.