On the eve of World War I the St. Petersburg Public Library acquired, from an anonymous donor, 124 letters from V. P. Turgeneva to her son, Ivan Sergeevich, written from 1838 to 1844. His side of the correspondence is not extant, but his youthful personality is often vividly evoked by his mother’s words, and his letters are reflected and occasionally quoted in hers. These letters from the hand of V. P. would comprise, an archivist once observed, a thick book.1 During the era they represent, I. S. (“Milyi drug i syn, Vanichka,” somewhat more frequently “Mon cher Jean”) entered Berlin University to study philosophy, traveled in Europe, published twenty short poems and the comic verse narrative Parasha, met Vissarion Belinskii and became his friend, began his lifelong friendship with the Viardots, was first stricken with gallstones and other complaints, published his first story (already mature and polished, “Andrei Kolosov“), and wrote part of a work of fiction now seen as a key to his creativity (“Perepiska,” published in 1856).

Lev Tolstoi had originally intended to open Anna Karenina with a scene in Princess Betsy’s salon, later moved to part 2 of the novel, in which the work’s central themes are all touched on in the conversation of the gathered guests. This introductory discussion primarily concerns illicit liaisons, but alongside the talk of adultery, one guest states, “The theme is everything. Once one has a theme, it is easy to embroider on it” (121). These words obliquely acknowledge a debt to one of the novel’s sources, Aleksandr Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights,” a story about improvisation in which that art is conceived not merely as the instantaneous or impromptu invention we usually think of, but even more importantly as the appropriation of someone else’s topic. Anna Karenina, and some of Tolstoi’s later works as well, make important borrowings from Pushkin’s story about borrowing, employing both themes from “Egyptian Nights” and therefore the methods of the Italian improvisor in it.

Among the most prominent generic signals of Dostoevskii’s The Possessed are those suggesting allegory. Allegory is one of several genres in the novel referred to by name. The narrator characterizes Stepan Trofimovich’s romantic poema as “some sort of allegory” (9) and remarks that, after the most intimate of encounters with his patroness, Stepan Trofimovich would sometimes “jump up from the couch and beat the wall with his fists,” all of which “without the slightest allegory“ (12). Concerning the climax of Iuliia Mikhailovna’s soirée, an allegorical representation of the various literary schools and tendencies of the day, the narrator reports, “It would have been difficult to imagine a more pitiful, tactless, talentless, and vapid allegory than that ‘literary quadrille’” (389). On a more fundamental level, the work’s second epigraph, the passage from the Gospel of Luke describing the exorcism of a possessed man and the flight of the demons into a herd of swine, provides an allegorical foundation for the entire action, projecting the work against biblical history.

“Anyone who reads the letters that passed between the Intendants and their superiors or subordinates,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “cannot fail to be struck by the family likeness between the government officials of the past and those of modern France.” He added that not only the personnel and institutions but even the internal bureaucratic terminology of the old regime was similar to that of postrevolutionary, republican France. Despite their obsession with the French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionary rulers had probably not read Tocqueville’s cautionary tale about the persistence of the old-regime state. If they had, they might have learned quite a bit.

Since the collapse of communism, much scholarship has examined the efforts by the countries of east central Europe and the former Soviet Union to develop democratic regimes. The majority of such studies have focused on institutional development and the problems of democratic transition at the national level. Although this focus is not at all surprising given the highly centralized political structures that have been the legacy of the communist past, the efficacy, indeed the ultimate success or failure of democratization, may well rest largely on the ability of local government to satisfy citizen demands. Local government is most directly involved in delivering the goods and services that affect people’s daily lives. Hence, citizens often form their judgments of political systems based on the performance of local government. To the degree that democracy depends on the loyalty of the citizenry, local government is important to the survival of democracy.

Who rules is the central question posed by scholars studying local government. This issue lies at the heart of democracy. While it is nowhere the case that citizens rule directly, in a democracy their preferences must have some effect on public policy.