Journey to Armenia, Osip Mandel'shtam's most autobiographically engaged masterpiece of the 1930s is no ordinary journey.2 Written in Moscow during the summer of 1931, a year after his six-month sojourn in Armenia and Georgia, this contemplative journey adheres to an “itinerary” shaped by the path Mandel'shtam followed both in his quest for truth—“that truth which helps us to form a better sense of ourselves in tradition”—and in his search for a method to articulate that truth—a “method of creative cognition, a suitable means of gaining a sense of life.” His “method of creative cognition” mediates between the poet's contemplation of contemporary reality and his meditation on the mystery of creation, or the creative impulse, whose origins he seeks in the deepest structures of language and legend, whose eternal principles he ponders in the organic phenomena of nature, and whose multiplicity of expression he experiences in the art, architecture, and archaeology of Armenia.

The social conditions for scientific work in the Stalin era are often assumed to have been patterned more or less after Lysenkoism and Soviet genetics in the 1930s and 1940s. Much less is known about other areas of Soviet science in the same period. Were Lysenkoism and the fate of genetics typical or atypical of what was happening in other areas of Soviet science under Stalin? The case of Vladimir I. Vernadskii, an earth scientist, and his scientific school in the years between 1928 and 1945 documents the survival and development of an important tradition very different from that of Lysenkoism and suggests something about the mentality of one segment of the scientific intelligentsia with strong ties to prerevolutionary Russian science. The fate of the Vernadskii school suggests something of the diversity and complexity of Soviet science, even during the worst years of the Stalinist regime and illuminates some of the ways Soviet scientists like Vernadskii were able to protect their scientific enterprises and continue a critical tradition in Russian science despite political interference.

“One of Nekrasov's very greatest works, the long poem Moroz, Krasnyi Nos, which by virtue of its profound penetration into the life of the peasant and its powerful pictorial and lyrical style transcends almost everything which has been written about the Russian countryside, has yet to be studied [izucheno] in our country.” So wrote Kornei Chukovskii a quarter of a century ago.

The critic's complaint was surely exaggerated. After all, one of the century's most eminent Nekrasov scholars, Vladislav E. Evgen'ev-Maksimov, had given the poem his serious and sustained attention, and lesser investigators have in the last fifty years significantly increased our understanding of its metrical, folkloric, and polemical aspects. These critical forays notwithstanding, in a sense Chukovskii's statement holds true to this day. For if it is agreed that what we expect most from criticism is an expanded understanding of what a literary work is about; if, in other words, it is the critic as exegete whom we value most highly (there are of course those who would dispute the premise), then Moroz, Krasnyi Nos has indeed been neglected. For, more than 120 years after its publication a serious hermaneutic study of this famous poem is still wanting.

Russian folk wisdom regarded the daughter-in-law, the snokha (a word that also meant sister-in-law), as a source of family friction. Unable to coexist in the cramped quarters of the peasant hut, or izba, where a mother-in-law ruled over the stove and a father-in-law kept watch on the family purse, the daughter-inlaw supposedly made evident her discontent. A host of proverbs and folk sayings attest to the idea of the snokha as troublemaker: the saying that the daughter-in-law “likes the family hands but resents the family pot” summed up this resentment. According to this view, the daughter-in-law took but did not give.

Twentieth-century historians, influenced perhaps by Soviet interpretations as well as by literary impressions, see the peasant daughter-in-law in the prerevolutionary era not as a source of friction but rather as a helpless victim of family hostility: a husband's beatings, a mother-in-law's tyranny, a father-in-law's sexual harassment.

In a previous publication I demonstrated the enormous value of Russia's overseas commodity exports to Great Britain's industrial development during the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet when value is determined only by sheer volume of commodities, the determination, even when supported by impressive shipping data, might not be as convincing as a determination of value based on other factors, for example, on money value.

Scholars continue to argue over specific aspects of Anglo-Russian trade, over the accuracy of British commercial records, and over the degree of British involvement in Russian overseas commerce. This article addresses these issues and suggests that historians should not forget to look at the broad trends in the value of that trade when they debate specific aspects of the commercial relations between the two nations. Moreover, it seems to me that value comprehended in English pounds sterling or Russian rubles would further demonstrate the significance of Russia's overseas commodity trade to Great Britain, since such a demonstration would rest, as it were, on a surer foundation.