In this article, Elżbieta Ostrowska employs categories of postcolonialism to examine two novels by Henryk Sienkiewicz,With Fire and Sword and Fire in the Steppe, and their filmic adaptations by Jerzy Hoffman. Her aim is to reconstruct their ideological discourse regarding Polish national identity and its positioning within Europe. Located between east and west, Poland was both a colonizing power (of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia) and a colonized country (by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary). These two novels, written during the time of partitions, offer a nostalgic vision of the country’s past power and its colonizing aspirations. Ostrowska argues that various textual efforts aimed at solidifying the notion of national identity and its positioning within a geopolitical order of Europe are disrupted by structures of female desire implicitly present in both the novels and films. These structures puncture the solid fabric of the national historical epic and undermine the hegemonic notion of Polish masculinity.

In this study, Yulia Mikhailova and David Prestel suggest that the political culture of pre-Mongolian Rus’ may be similar to that of post-Carolingian Europe, where public order still existed in the absence of a strong centralized authority. In Rus’ as also in the west, there was an order of norms rather than of institutions. Drawing on sources such as the Testament of Vladimir Monomakh and the Homily of Princes, Mikhailova and Prestel maintain that cross kissing was considered a sacred obligation for Rus’ rulers, a view given further support by the behavior of princes as recorded in the chronicles. They appear to trust oaths made on the cross and accept that there will be negative consequences for those who break them. Violations threaten one's salvation, and when chroniclers are favorably disposed to certain princes, they attempt to demonstrate that their violations are justified by an offence on the part of the prince with whom the agreement was enacted.

In this article, Ilya Kliger and Nasser Zakariya treat Lev Tolstoi's conception of brotherhood from a narratological perspective. In the process, they trace the outlines of late Tolstoian narrative poetics, situating it within a variegated landscape of Tolstoi's own more properly “realist” literary practice, and offering broader suggestions on the workings of narrative in its capacity to model social relations and ethical action. A narratological focus here allows them to elucidate how stories take part in contemporary understandings of social influence, human connectedness, and alienation— not only on the level of themes but also, and more deeply, on the level of the narrative organization of events. Their main focus is on one of Tolstoi's late novellas “The Forged Coupon” and his last novel Resurrection.

Ani Kokobobo addresses the novel The Palace of Dreams (1981) by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, with a particular focus on the larger significance of the novel's dream project. Through fictional processes of dream collection, selection, and interpretation, Kadare meditates on two twentieth-century movements that either overtly or covertly incorporated dreams in their ideological platforms: surrealism and socialism. Kokobobo posits that as a political and aesthetic category the dream serves Kadare as the ideal epistemological vessel for investigating the interrelatedness of socialism and surrealism. Throughout the novel, Kadare emphasizes socialism's Utopian inclinations, the dislocation of political decisions from political realities in this system, and the mutual disturbance of both reality and the imagination that such a dislocation produces. At the same time, the dream narrative helps him launch a surrealist poetics and metapoetically counter the damage dealt to the imagination by political realities.

Studies of witchcraft belief and persecution in Russia have been profoundly, and to a significant degree mistakenly, shaped by European understandings of witchcraft as fundamentally demonic and integrally linked to the power of the devil. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson's concepts of “prosaics” and “semiotic totalitarianism,” derived from their readings of M. M. Bakhtin, offer a productive way to set imported preconceptions aside and to comprehend the specificities of Muscovite witchcraft beliefs. Pre-Petrine ideas about witchcraft conformed to no uniform, overarching ideological or explanatory schema, satanic or otherwise. Muscovite witchcraft operated instead as a diffuse, resolutely prosaic collection of beliefs and practices, whereas the more demonologically inflected European beliefs approached the imposed uniformity of “semiotic totalitarianism.” In this article, Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen propose a corrective to a widespread propensity for reading Russian material through European paradigms and analyze Russian beliefs on their own, prosaic terms.

In this article, Anna Wexler Katsnelson focuses on Grigorii Aleksandrov's musical comedy, 'Svetlyi put' (The Radiant Path, 1940) as a way of investigating the modes of screening laughter in the USSR in the 1930s and exploring the reasons for the film's gradual disavowal of laughter. The key questions posed by the article are why does laughter disappear from the nominally comedic, purposefully merry Svetlyi put'? Where is its affective energy redirected? And, finally, is laughter on film at all possible under the conditions of high Stalinism?

In this article, Ilya Kliger describes the workings of “tragic realism” during the early to mid-1840s in Russia by engaging with the critical essays and letters of Vissarion Belinskii as well as with the first novels of Ivan Goncharov and Aleksandr Herzen. Kliger seeks to show that the concepts and forms produced by the authors standing at the inception of the realist tradition in Russia can be usefully seen as transpositions of the Hegelian theorization of modernity and of its privileged formal companion, the Bildungsroman. Seen against the background of Hegel's post-tragic conception of contemporary “actuality,” these authors can be understood as developing a historico-formal paradox, a vision of tragic realism. Tragic realism grasps contemporary life in terms of destructive and irreconcilable collisions and presupposes the broader historiographic vision of Russia's anachronistic position vis-à-vis the Hegelian vision of modern life.

Lev Tolstoi, in his dunking about life, death, freedom, and immortality, drew significandy on the German philosophical tradition from Leibniz and Moses Mendelssohn to Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, as Lina Steiner argues in this article. Herder, who tried to salvage rationalism by getting away from the mechanistic metaphysics of the French Enlightenment and reintroducing the teleological explanation of nature, was a particularly important influence on Tolstoi. Herder's view of life, including both individual life and the life of community, as organic Bildung underlay the artistic conception of War and Peace, Tolstoi's first major fictional narrative. Tolstoi continued to develop this organicist paradigm in his later sociopolitical, religious, and aesthietic writings.

By giving us a horse's perspective on human life, Lev Tolstoi's Kholstomer (1886) has usually been recognized in the west as a stellar example of the author's use of “defamiliarization.” Most of the critical attention the story has received in Russia, by contrast, consists of Soviet-era studies diat examine the creative history of the text and/or remark on its satiric elements. In this article, Ronald D. LeBlanc examines instead the treatment of the themes of sex, love, and motherhood in Tolstoi's story about a castrated horse. In particular, he explores the significance that castration— with its accompanying cessation of sexual desire—appears to have in this story about a selfless gelding, a tale that may be read as the expression of a desire on the author's part to be unburdened of the affliction of sexual lust and thus to be freed to pursue a more spiritual, less carnal existence on earth.

Samuil Marshak's poem Mister Twister (1933) is a biting satire about an evil American capitalist who travels to the Soviet Union with his spoiled wife and daughter. The work enjoyed immense popularity among generations of Soviet children until the 1980s and is considered a prime example of a socialist spoof on a genre of travelogue oriented toward mass culture. Yuri Leving puts Marshak's poem into a historical context and observes it against the ever-changing ideological landscape of Soviet literature during the three decades following the poem's initial publication in the satirical magazine for children, Ezh (Hedgehog). In Twister, Marshak was able to strike a careful balance between the comic and the ideological: although an obviously satirical portrayal, the protagonist sometimes appears more sympathetic than malignant. Over the years Marshak tried to adapt his poem to shifting official climates, a process that resulted in a series of curious metamorphoses highlighting a double-edged relationship between the mechanisms of oppression, auto-censorship, and laughter under state socialism. In addition, the article surveys Vladimir Lebedev's illustrative convoy of "Mister Twister" throughout its rich republication history and discusses visual representations vis-à-vis the issue of producing (rather than depicting) totalitarian humor.