The category of tendentiousness—with its dogmatic, didactic, and aesthetically conservative inclinations—seems inherently opposed to the logic of modernism, which emphasized the aesthetic moment of formal innovation. While many modernists argued for the compatibility between aesthetic and political revolution, they invariably met the skepticism of those demanding a clear, ůnambiguously expressed political message from art. But was this conceptual divide unbridgeable? In this article, Peter Zusi explores this question through the case of the Czech theorist of the interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige. Teige exemplifies how the early Czech avant-garde adopted such terms as function and popular character (lidovost) from nineteenth-century Czech discourse, where they had served to celebrate the tendentious applicability of cultural artifacts to a political movement of emancipation. For Teige, however, these terms quickly shifted from accentuating to critiquing political tendentiousness. Teige's shift, Zusi argues, does not represent the trace of cultural belatedness or conceptual confusion as much as it reveals the flexibility of conceptual oppositions too often conceived as static.

This study analyzes the biographies of a number of Soviet communications officials in order to address some fundamental and increasingly important questions about the communications process and about prospects for responding to the dilemmas that recent information about the Soviet audience has revealed. Major efforts to examine audience opinion have been undertaken in the Soviet Union. To a considerable extent these efforts are a response to the perception, on the part of media officials, that foreign communications sources have made inroads into the communications system and have created, especially in this time of increased bipolar world tension, alternative channels of information. As the officials recognize, the internal media system has changed substantially, and new patterns of communications consumption have emerged. But as a result of the findings of audience surveys, basic elements of the political doctrine concerning communications have been undermined.

Aleksandr Pushkin's cult for simple, unadorned prose is a critical commonplace that needs no further documentation. Weaned on those masters of French classicism (Jean de La Bruyère, Montesquieu, and, above all, Voltaire) for whom brevity was the soul of wit and concision no crime, he practiced from the beginning, “Naden'ka,” to the end, “Kirdzhali“ and The Captain's Daughter, a narrative style conspicuous for its uncommon bareness. That the virtues which he valued most highly in prose, namely, tochnost', kratkost', and nagaia prostata are, with rare exceptions, at one with his practice has been noted many times.

On 21 February 1854 Aleksandr Herzen met the future fifteenth president, James Buchanan, at a dinner given by the American consul in London for notable European revolutionary exiles. As Herzen's careerlong interest in the United States never led him to visit its shores and but rarely encompassed face-to-face meetings with its citizens, his published version of the encounter, in Part VI of Byloe i dumy (My Past and Thoughts), provides an intriguing testing ground for his theories about and images of the “Trans-Atlantic Republic,” theories and images that received wide currency among the Russian intellegentsia of the midnineteenth century.