When Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, carrying out the decision of the military council Peter I had called at the time of the siege of Nienshants, placed an earthwork fortress on one of the islands of the Neva Delta, it is highly unlikely that anyone suspected what the consequences of this step would be. It was simply a timely move that made it possible to cut off the Neva’s channel by artillery fire, so that the Swedish fleet could not aid the beleaguered town by sea. The fortress proved useless in all respects: It never had occasion to beat back the enemy, whereas defending the Admiralty Wharf on the other side of the river was beyond its reach. It seemed appropriate to build another fortress around the wharf as quickly as possible. On all sides of both fortifications a small town began to spread out irregularly, and it bore the name of the tsar’s heavenly guardian, the apostle Peter.

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.

Andrei Belyi, in Nachalo veka, recalls walks that he took with Aleksandr Blok through the back streets of Petersburg during the weeks that followed Bloody Sunday in January 1905. These walks reminded Belyi of the poems that Blok was writing at the same time and that he published in Nechaiannaia radosť in 1906.

Grigorii Soroka was a serf, one of millions in prereform Russia. He was not particularly set apart by his artistic talent, for many peasants revealed their individual expressive gifts in carved decoration, ceramics, toy making, and other crafts. Soroka was unusual, however, in that he received instruction from Aleksei Venetsianov, a retired bureaucrat, small-property owner, and renowned painter. Soroka, despite his refined talents, remained a serf, for his owner, N. P. Miliukov, unheeding of Venetsianov’s pleas, refused to manumit his “serf artist.” When the Emancipation came, then, Soroka led his villagers in drawing up a petition protesting the terms that Miliukov sought to impose. The petition, addressed to the tsar, was returned to the provincial office for peasant affairs and shown to Miliukov who, enraged, then drew up his own complaint against the peasants. Soroka was summoned to the volost offices, arrested, held for three days, and then sentenced to a flogging for “obstreperous behavior and for spreading false rumors.” On 10 April 1864 Grigorii Soroka was seen wandering distractedly about the village, and the next day his wife found his body hanging from the rafters in a cold storage building.

In investigations of the evolution of the corporation in Europe, North America, and the Far East, historians have illuminated variations in the structure of large enterprises in different times and places and investigated responses to legal environments. In tsarist Russia as well, the development of corporations on the national, regional, and sectoral levels was influenced by legal and economic institutions. Data on Russian corporations, however, have been inadequate for the complex statistical tests applied to the European and North American economies. This article offers a preliminary overview of trends in Russian corporate development from 1700 to 1914 in light of a new database and the recently articulated theory of organizational ecology. Although the theory provides stimulating approaches to the history of Russian corporations, it also appears unduly specific in some respects to the history of western Europe and the United States.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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?

Addressing what he sees as serious disjunctures in characterization and narrative technique, Joseph Frank has called Idiot “the most disorganized,” of Fedor Dostoevskii’s major works. The first part of the novel so differs from the last three parts, Frank holds, that it may “best be read as an independent novella.” Although, undoubtedly, many subtle structural, thematic, and rhetorical elements tie the novel together, Idiot does seem at times to generate as much centrifugal as centripetal force. Tackling this issue head on, Robin Feuer Miller, with judicious use of reader-response theory, succeeds in imposing some order on the narrational disjunctures of the text, setting up a hierarchy of narrators and narrative personae. More problematic, however, is the question of point of view in the larger sense. In the Bakhtinian sense, point of view manifests itself in the relation between the different narrators of the novel as the autonomous voices of the characters and the narrator enter into an unfinished dialogue. The broader use of the term concerns the novel’s worldviews, or master plots, which variously govern and structure the presentation of character, story, and metaphor.

The problem of abolishing serfdom preoccupied Russian social thinkers long before the Emancipation in 1861. In spite of more than a century of scholarship devoted to analyzing the peasant question, however, historians have reached no consensus on such fundamental issues as the origins and political implications of abolitionist thought. Did advocacy of peasant emancipation by members of the landed nobility spring from liberal altruism or from a selfish desire to defend seigneurial interests against revolutionary peasants and the peasants’ spokesmen, the so-called “revolutionary democrats”? Can Slavophilism and westernism be classified simply as varieties of liberalism, which, whatever their minor differences, agreed on the necessity of avoiding peasant revolution and regarded Russian radicals as pernicious enemies? Before emancipation were Russian liberals sharply differentiated ideologically from more radical intellectuals, such as Aleksandr I. Herzen and Nikolai G. Chernyshevskii—a differentiation traceable to attitudes toward the peasant emancipation? Or did the definitive split between liberalism and radicalism come after the Emancipation? Scholars bring to these questions such disparate conceptions of Russian politics and of the nature of historical proof that achieving consensus may be impossible. Nevertheless, the Soviet historian Vera F. Zakharina has argued convincingly that certain facets of the larger questions can be illuminated by investigating the ideological assumptions in the letters and programmatic works of major social thinkers and especially by observing how these assumptions changed over time.

Liberalized cultural discussion in the Soviet Union after the Twenty-seventh Party Congress in 1985 was concerned in part with the nature of a literature that would be appropriate to the new ideals of openness and restructuring. In Ukraine, as elsewhere, the debate brought forth a list of imperatives that, without challenging the socialist realist principle that literature must serve overarching social and political goals, amounted to a formula for a new kind of literary engagement. Literature must “boldly intrude into contemporary reality,” it must defend the historical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological heritage and must unmask the crimes and abuses of the past and present. It must no longer be bland and inoffensive and must not avoid controversial issues or praise the status quo as a matter of course.

Social historians have argued for three decades that the Russian Revolution was preeminently a workers’ revolution. Leopold Haimson was the first to propose, in an influential 1964 article, that workers themselves, and not, as the prevailing wisdom then held, Lenin and the Bolshevik party, prepared the way for the October Revolution. In this article, however, I will argue that in some instances ideological institutions had shaped the workers’ expectations.

All literature can be understood as text; it can be interpreted, but not all literature asks to be. Text describes a literary work as it moves within and between cultures; it implies interpretation and the readers’ active participation. To use the term text is to make assumptions that are not universal. While literature can bridge the many cultures that create and read it, it can also be confined to a specific frame within its own culture. It can resist bridging, just as it resists independent interpretation. Literature as performance, as an example, is intended for one time and one place. Performance looks at the literary work inside its intended environment. The meaning of the work is predicated by the occasion and conventions of its reading; the audience is asked not to insinuate its own interpretation but to participate in the one provided. Performance can be a physical realization of text in time and space; and, even when an actual performance does not take place, the term suggests an important way of reading.

“Mne nenadobno puteshestvovať. la puteshestvuiu v svoem voobrazhenii,” said Aleksandr Pushkin, not quite ingenuously, toward the end of his life. Pushkin’s chronic desire for travel had so often been frustrated or deflected that his loudly lamented exile in the early 1820s to the Caucasus, Crimea, Bessarabia, and Odessa later came to represent, faute de mieux, the peripatetic freedom of his youth. When in 1829 Pushkin and Petr A. Viazemskii were refused permission to travel to Paris, Pushkin embarked instead on the illicit trip south that would become the basis for his literary “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” six years later. In 1836, with a rueful backward glance at the orientalist fashion that he himself had helped to launch in Russian poetry, Pushkin wrote, “Vinovat: ia by otdal vse, chto bylo pisano u nas v podrazhanie l.(ordu) Bai(ronu), za sleduiushchie nezadumchivye i ne-vostorzhennye stikhi, v kotorykh poet zastavliaet geroia svoego vosklitsať druz’iam: Druz’ia! Sestritsy! ia v Parizhe! Ia nachal zhit’, a nedyshať!” (12:93). Perhaps the exuberant first words of an unfinished drama, “Cherez nedeliu budy v Parizhe nepremenno” represent a vestige of that never-to-be-realized desire (7:251-253). In short, if the south served as an escape valve for dreams of uninhibited motion and adventure, it was also a surrogate, marking the boundaries rather than the fulfillment of that freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the theme of the seductive border crossing is central to the “Puteshestvie v Arzrum” (8:1, 463):

The structure of Doktor Zhivago is in many respects unique. Its concluding chapter is a collection of poems ostensibly composed by the novel’s central figure. The preceding sixteen prose chapters are themselves further divided into numerous individual scenes, focused on a predominant image, that may be likened to separate cinematic shots. In this respect, the novel lends itself to discussion of the relations between narrative and cinematic technique. It also seeks a certain reconciliation between specific incidents documented in prose and then later reformulated as poetry, affording a sense of “dialogue” between the two classic modes of expression. The purpose of this essay, however, will be to consider dialogue primarily in its concrete sense, rather than range across an entire figurative spectrum, to which the term or its derivatives seem, in recent usage, naturally to gravitate. Metaphoric interpretation, nevertheless, will also find its place here in response to the poetic qualities of the work itself. In broad outline, the intent of this study will be to concentrate upon a specific complex aspect of the novel, its dialogic structures, and attempt to demonstrate that, within this singular work, they are worthy of attention as principal features accounting for its singularity.

In 1974, soon after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, the literary scholar Andrei Siniavskii once again deferred to his created alter ego, the writer Abram Terts, to pass provocative judgment on the Soviet literary scene. The essay ascribed to Terts, “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii,” reviews unofficial Soviet literature to highlight its artistic (rather than moral) appeal. As Terts reads it, the punitive context of this literature—established by Stalin and enforced to a less rigorous extent through the Leonid Brezhnev era—inadvertently guaranteed art and the fate of the artist richness and power:

The question of humanity’s moral makeup has high priority in current sociopolitical and cultural discussions in the Soviet Union. At issue is whether a person is a “clean sheet” whose moral makeup represents nothing but the experience of and reactions to the surrounding environment, or, conversely, a “living soul” endowed with such mysterious and irrational faculties as love, mercy, and compassion. Concern about a lack of morality and spirituality in Soviet society increased significantly in the arts and media after the period of relative liberalization, the thaw, was over and another period, officially referred to now as “the period of stagnation,” began. This change took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Soviet literature of the time, pragmatism stood out as a primary cause for concern in the works of the derevenshchiki, the village writers. Their approach to this problem, however, was limited by their attempts to resolve it within the context of old and not necessarily adequate stereotyped oppositions: village versus city, nature versus technology, Russian versus western.