The headline in the 15 August 1937 issue of the Great Falls Tribune proclaimed, “Montana Families Have Their Own Colony in Poland.” This colony of eight American families constituted the upper management of the Giesche Mining Company of Katowice, Silesia. Owned by Americans since 1926, the Giesche Company was Poland's largest zinc mining company and one of Poland's largest coal producers. The newspaper article described the beautiful wooded site where the Americans lived, the nearby golf course, the good winter skiing, the numerous Hollywood films available at the local movie house, and the Americans' Polish language lessons.

When “Bezhin Meadow” first appeared in Sovremennik in 1851, Turgenev’s friend Feoktistov wrote to him that while the story had “produced an enormous effect on the public in Moscow,” he found it lacked a “general impression,” a “general thread,” that would unify its fragmentary parts and give the reader a clue to its general significance. Well might Feoktistov have been puzzled, for the censor had omitted the story’s ending! The ending was soon available to the reader in the edition of A Hunter’s Notes published in Moscow in 1852: “With sorrow I must add that Pavel died before the year was out. He was not drowned, but killed by a fall from a horse. A pity, he was a splendid lad !“ While indicating a “general thread,” the theme of mortality, the lines produce what may at first appear to be a facile irony.

In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. “I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, ‘Mayakovsky'.“

The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives (“Night,“ “Morning,” “The Street,” etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes (“I,” “Man,” “A Cloud in Trousers“), is total negation of the status quo.

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.

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.

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.