In response to his banishment to barbaric Tomis, on the Black Sea, in 8 C.E., Ovid composed the Tristia, entreaties to Emperor Augustus to permit his return to civilized Rome. Feeling equally alienated from fin-de-siècle Vienna, the Czech expatriate poet, Josef Svatopluk Machar, produced the slim collection Tristium Vindobona. One poem, “První dojmy” (First impressions), finds Machar's narrator and alter ego tormented by visions of an otherworldly and unattainable Prague. “Na Kahlenbergu” (On Kahlenberg) takes the narrator to the eponymous hill outside Vienna, where he invokes his distressed land to the north. The legacy of Habsburg dominion over the Czechs appears to him as a “wide and bloody path“ spanning historical battlegrounds from Diirnkrut, near Vienna, to the White Mountain, west of Prague. Czech critics in 1893 hailed Tristium as both a literary and a political event, its stature enhanced by its publication under the “shadow of bayonets,” that is, during an official state of emergency in Prague. The young critic Emanuel z Čenkova raised only an amicable objection in his review in Literární listy: Machar's narrator could easily come home—eluding reverie and history—since “express trains cross like lightning” between Vienna and Prague.

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film, Austeria (The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for his Mother Joanna of the Angels (a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella, Austeria, a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime, Austeria was widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

The first-person narrative form is notoriously problematic. Throughout the history of the novel, it has both repelled authors due to the obvious limitations imposed by its restriction to a single consciousness and attracted them because of the apparent veracity it imparts to psychological portrayal. In the most conscientiously constructed examples of the type, the first-person narrator is able to portray directly the thoughts of a single character only, that is, himself. Of other characters, he can only report actions and surmise motives, and these characters to whom the reader does not have cognitive privilege may appear to be two-dimensional or even come off as caricatures.

Fedor Dostoevskii's Besy (Demons, 1871-72) is a first-person memoir novel. My thesis is that the novel's narrative form itself involves the reader psychologically and morally in problems that occupied Dostoevskii throughout his life—problems of freedom, contingency, and eternity.

In his 1913 guide to the city, Grigorii Moskvich wrote that the dream of the “essential Odessan” was to strike it rich and immediately acquire a house, a carriage, and everything else he needed in order to “transform himself (by appearance, of course) into an impeccable British gentleman or blue-blooded Viennese aristocrat.” Then, “immaculately dressed, with an expensive cigar in his teeth,” the remade Odessan was ready to meet his public. Whether “getting into a carriage or sitting down in one of the better cafés, on the boulevard or in the park,” the Odessan was “out to impress by his appearance, aware of his own worth, looking down on everyone and everything below.” “Odessans are proud of themselves (not without foundation), flaunting their ability to dress as well as any purebred Parisian or Viennese.” Women, too, were always well turned out, “no husband carrying the expenses of his wife's toilette as uncomplainingly as the Odessan… . This passion for fashion, the desire to impress by external appearances, penetrates all of Odessa society, from the counts to the cooks,” the writer declared.

During World War II, images of mothers constituted one of the most striking—and lasting—additions to Soviet propaganda. The appearance of “Mother Russia” has been understood as a manifestation of the Soviet state's wartime renunciation of appeals to Marxism-Leninism and its embrace of nationalism. Yet “Mother Russia” (rodina-mat', more literally, the “motherland mother“) was an ambiguous national figure. The word rodina, from the verb rodit', to give birth, can mean birthplace both in the narrow sense of hometown and in the broad sense of “motherland,” and it suggests the centrality of the private and the local in wartime conceptions of public duty. Mothers functioned in Soviet propaganda both as national symbols and as the constantly reworked and reimagined nexus between home and nation, between love for the family and devotion to the state. From this point of view, the new prominence of mothers in wartime propaganda can be understood as part of what Jeffrey Brooks has identified as the “counter-narrative” of individual initiative and private motives, as opposed to party discipline, that dominated the centrally controlled press's coverage of the first years of the war.

The object of this article is to revisit the themes originally explored in this journal thirty-five years ago in a discussion somewhat misleadingly entitled, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917.”’ As older readers of the Slavic Review may recall, this discussion set off heated debates centered on the theses presented in this article about the dual processes of polarization that I distinguished in the dynamics of the political and social crisis in urban Russia even before the outbreak of war: polarization between the industrial workers employed in Russia's urban centers and the well-to-do strata of urban “society,” including those of the professional intelligentsia; and polarization between both the upper and lower strata of Russia's urban centers and the bureaucratic circles that sought to represent the interests and will of the sovereign.