In the search for meaning which its conclusion provokes, a life, inevitably, is scrutinized for patterns, symbols, and general themes; it is read, in short, as a text. Suicide becomes a bloody signature on the bottom of a ragged page, the final and incontrovertible assertion of authorial control over one’s own life. At the same time, however, the suicide relinquishes all future control over everything, including future interpretations of his or her life-as-text. As a Pyrrhic means of giving the planned, narrative structure of a text to life, suicide functions as an uncanny fulcrum between “meaningful” life and “meaningless” death; hence its fascination. The supreme instance of human will triumphing over cruel nature’s whims is also the moment of greatest surrender to death’s lack of meaning. Witnesses and analysts rush in to provide interpretation and theory.

Western and even Soviet publications have described the 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “man-made” or “artificial.” The Stalinist leadership is presented as having imposed harsh procurement quotas on Ukraine and regions inhabited by other groups, such as Kuban’ Cossacks and Volga Germans, in order to suppress nationalism and to overcome opposition to collectivization. Proponents of this interpretation argue, using official Soviet statistics, that the 1932 grain harvest, especially in Ukraine, was not abnormally low and would have fed the population. Robert Conquest, for example, has referred to a Soviet study of drought to show that conditions were far better in 1932 than they were in 1936, a “non-famine year.” James Mace, the main author of a U.S. Congress investigation of the Ukraine famine, cites “post-Stalinist” statistics to show that this harvest was larger than those of 1931 or 1934 and refers to later Soviet historiography describing 1931 as a worse year than 1932 because of drought. On this basis he argues that the 1932 harvest would not have produced mass starvation.

Evgenii Alekseevich Preobrazhenskii has been one of the most important yet least known figures on the Bolshevik Olympus: a prominent party functionary, economist, journalist, and writer, a talented organizer of scholarly research, and educator. For political reasons, however, his activities have long been virtually ignored in Soviet writing. References to him in Soviet histories of the Communist party or economic histories have been one-sided and sketchy.

Preobrazhenskii was born on 15 February 1886 (old style) in Bolkhov in Ore guberniia. His father, Aleksei Aleksandrovich Preobrazhenskii, was an Orthodox priest and Bible teacher at the Bolkhov Parochial School. Evgenii Alekseevich studied at his father's private school and completed two years at the Bolkhov City School.

The experience of Ukrainian Jewry from 1917 to 1920 is a paradox in modern Jewish history. At the same moment that the leaders of the Ukrainian revolutionary movement extended unprecedented civil rights to Ukrainian Jews, pogromists operating in the name of that same movement brutally terrorized hundreds of Jewish communities with violence and robbery. This strange incongruity has not been satisfactorily addressed; studies of the period have either concentrated on the pogroms or focused on Jewish socialists in Ukrainian politics. Linguistic barriers and subsequent developments, notably the 1926 assassination of Symon Petliura, have further polarized an already dichotomous history. This article attempts to synthesize these two trends.

The Soviet reappraisal of Stalin that began in 1986 was initially manifest only in the cultural sphere, although more recently it has spread to other domains. Anatolii Rybakov's novel Deti Arbata played a decisive role in preparing the way for a reassessment of Stalin's legacy. Its publication was immediately recognized as “an event of enormous significance,” reflecting the hunger for history and the wish to dethrone Stalin. In fact, the novel became the symbol of glasnost. It is the first novel to portray Stalin as a major character, to draw his psychological and historical portrait, and to demythologize his image. Furthermore, it does so for the first time without khitroglasie. Portraying the first generation of Soviet citizens, the children of the Arbat, it introduces the theme of exile into Soviet literature and sketches the social relations and the social psychology of the people in 1934.

Despite the richness of primary sources covering the 1917-1921 period of Soviet history, the swirl of events and disagreements over policy among the Bolsheviks make the period confusing for the scholar. In this confusion and understandable disorder, the goals and policies of the Soviet leaders were remarkably consistent: They sought to acquire and retain full control. Lenin and his colleagues were fully aware of the importance of history and of those who wrote and taught it. In their new world, history was to provide the scientific explanation of the past and provide guidance for the future, but acquiring power and beginning construction of the new society occupied higher priorities for them than did the, historical profession.

Russian lubki, or popular prints, of the eighteenth century reveal clearly an archaic premodern humor. Since 1945 much seventeenth century and early eighteenth century urban popular literature, which before existed only in manuscript books, collections of stories, and plays, has been published and has revealed a native tradition of popular humor in Russian print.' The appearance in popular prints of various characters and activities from the popular festive culture, scenes from popular theatricals, parodies of sundry rites and proceedings, and so forth attest to the fact that this culture of popular humor was thriving in the early eighteenth century.

The death of a poet is a theme Marina Tsvetaeva addressed frequently both in poetry and in prose. The list of poets whose deaths underwent Tsvetaeva’s artistic scrutiny is varied and includes Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Maksimilian Voloshin, Andrei Belyi, and Nikolai Gronskii. A number of notable lyric cycles and some of Tsvetaeva’s finest prose essays emerged as homage to deceased poets. The function of these works extends beyond commemoration and entails the elaboration of Tsvetaeva’s definition of lyric poetry and her exploration of poetic responsibility.

More than two dozen Soviet astronomers were arrested between March 1936 and July 1937. Few astronomers or historians are aware of the extent to which Soviet astronomy was devastated. This article investigates the situation in astronomy during these two years. It begins with a brief discussion of Soviet astronomy between 1917 and 1935 and continues with a detailed examination of the events that served as the catalyst for the purge, the arrests themselves, and a discussion of what is known about the fates of the victims.

In the mid-1930s the Soviet Union had approximately two hundred professional astronomers and sixteen astronomical observatories, most of which were associated with universities and had staffs of only two or three people. The most important and best equipped astronomical institution was the Central Astronomical Observatory of the USSR at Pulkovo, just outside Leningrad, with its branch observatories at Nikolaev and Simeis in the Ukraine. In 1935 thirty-three astronomers worked at Pulkovo.

When an eighteen-year-old peasant named Evgenii Mikhailovich Kostin stepped off a train in Moscow in October 1931 he felt overwhelmed by milling throngs of unfamiliar people and frightened by the commotion of the city. Yet his adjustment to urban life proved much less traumatic than his initial impression had portended; relatives housed him, an acquaintance from his village found him a job, and friends showed him around Moscow. Kostin was one of at least 23 million Soviet peasants who moved permanently to cities between 1926 and 1939—marking what demographers estimate to be the most rapid urbanization in world history. In the First Five-Year Plan alone Moscow’s population increased nearly 60 percent (an added 1,349,500 people) to reach 3,663,300 by the end of 1932. Scholars have portrayed peasant in-migration to Soviet cities during the 1930s either as a phenomenon tightly regulated by the state or, alternatively, as chaos and upheaval; but, as this article will demonstrate, the process by which peasants found their way to Moscow during the First Five-Year Plan was neither controlled nor chaotic.

Dumy, the oral epic songs of Ukraine, like other heroic poetries, have a military subject matter. One duma cycle tells of battles with the Turks and Tatars in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; another sings of the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising against the Poles that began in 1648. In addition to the expected narratives about armed conflict, the duma tradition also contains a group of songs, usually called the cycle about everyday life, that deals with topics only tenuously connected to war. These songs tell of such problems as filial ingratitude and sibling disloyalty. The popularity of this "unheroic" body of dumy relative to the other cycles suggests a powerful nonmilitary influence on the Ukrainian epic tradition at some point in its development. Other content features, some unusual elements in duma form, and many unique characteristics of duma performers likewise indicate such influence.

The apparent preoccupation with nonliterary arts in Mirgorod suggests that Nikolai Gogol', an uncannily successful experimenter-in-words, sought "comic prose equivalents for the effects of other media and genres." One narrator laments: "Gde voz'mu ia kistei i krasok, chtob izobrazit' raznoobrazie s'ezda i velikolepnoe pirshestvo?" But paint obviously is not needed since the pen, misleadingly condemned as "vialo, mertvo," elicits an elaborate picture on its own.

Horace's dictum, Utpictura poesis, might appear anachronistic today in light of modern literary theory, which has tended to view literature as a distinctly verbal form of art and has preferred lately (especially during the current craze for Mikhail Bakhtin) to examine such decidedly nongraphic aspects of prose fiction as narratology, dialogicality, and polyphony.

In “Muzhik Marei,” which appeared in the February issue of Dnevnik pisatelia for 1876, Fedor Dostoevskii “remembers” an experience from his time in Siberia. During Easter week the drunken carousing of his fellow convicts (which, he writes, “tormented me nearly to the point of illness” “do bolezni isterzalo menia”) had driven him out of the barracks into the yard. There he met the Polish prisoner, Miretskii, who said, “Je hais ces brigands” (22:46). These words drive Dostoevskii right back to the place from which, as he says, only fifteen minutes before, he had fled “kak bezumnyi.”

The two epigraphs disclose a crucial “genre gap” between Osip Mandel'shtam and Mikhail Bakhtin. If for Mandel'shtam dialogue is essential to lyric, for Bakhtin the dialogical discourse identifies the novel as a genre in opposition to monologic, self-centered and self-sufficient poetic language. In his essays “Fransua Villon” and “O sobesednike,” Mandel'shtam discusses different dimensions of dialogue—the dialogue between various historical epochs—modernity and Middle Ages, Ancient Greece and Renaissance, the dialogue between the author and the distant reader, and finally, the dialogue between the poet's diverse selves. The latter is called “lyrical hermaphroditism” and described in its multiple incarnations, including “ogorchennyi i uteshitel', mat’ i ditia, sudiia i podsudimyi, sobstvennik i nishchii.“ Mandel'shtam's “lyrical hermaphroditism” does not signify a Platonic ideal of androgynous wholeness, a reconciliation of two polarities.

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

The Moscow Trials forced the international anti-Stalinist Left to reconsider its most fundamental truths. The old, rigid categories of capitalism and socialism were no longer certain; a new urgency accompanied the question of where the revolution had gone astray. Many of the most outspoken anti-Stalinists searching for new answers had been either adherents or sympathizers of Trotskii. For many of these former staunch supporters, Trotskii's theoretical middle ground—at the same time hostile to the Stalinist bureaucracy but defensive of the land of socialized production— was no longer tenable. One after another, they broke with Trotskii. Yet this entire movement of reevaluation in Trotskii's intellectual entourage either has not been fully explored in discussions centering on Trotskii's views or, in a certain Trotskyist tradition, has been dismissed as a simple move to the Right. One of the best ways to understand both the roots and the context of such an intellectual upheaval is to focus on the key individuals.

“Just what does it mean, this face …?” Evgenii Pavlovich asks himself in the last pages of Idiot (p. 485). Evgenii Pavlovich has just come away from a last meeting with Prince Myshkin, to whom he has given an exhaustive, and gratuitous, accounting of the prince’s misconduct. The prince, of course, is more than willing to accept the blame. All he can plead in his defense is the face of Nastas’ia Filipovna. “But there was something else,” he urges, “something which you left out because you don’t know it: I had looked upon her face! Even that first morning in the portrait I could not withstand it” (p. 484). Such extraordinary susceptibility to the human face puzzles Evgenii Pavlovich. For all his perspicuity, this self-appointed raisonneur has a blind spot—even though he soon laughs off the prince’s words as the raving of a “poor idiot!” (p. 485). His baffled question, however, only serves to reiterate an issue that the entire novel in one way or another has posed from the opening pages: What is the meaning of the human face?

"Ivanov," a drama with a tendency, devoid of the "immediate and carefree objectivity" of the earlier works of Anton Chekhov, has seemed to at least one critic a turning point in the author's production. VI. Korolenko has suggested that "this first drama … might provide valuable material for the thoughtful biographer who will trace the history of a crisis of the soul, which had led Chekhov away from Novoe Vremia to Russkie Zapiski. Zhizri and Russkaia My si'."

In a letter of 1868 to Pavel Annenkov, Ivan Turgenev spoke of "Neschastnaia," the story that he had just finished writing, as "moia posledniaia dochka."' Authorship and paternity are conflated in this phrase, as are story and heroine: The melancholy Russian has given birth to a daughter.

Turgenev's statement of affiliation both hints at and obscures the genealogical truths of a story that takes familial complexity and silence as its explicit topic. "Neschastnaia" is a story which is about the silence surrounding a young woman's true place in a patriarchal household; its heroine is at once bound by and excluded from filial relationship. Beyond such explicit thematics, however, there lies another genealogical story in which Turgenev himself takes part. This second story concerns the legitimacy of Turgenev himself as much as that of his heroine; it touches on the genesis of Turgenev's own art and his relationship to women writers of the 184Qs. It is a story suggested by the thematics of paternity and legitimacy and also by the very structure of Turgenev's narrative.