A forum on Boris Mironov's Russian and English editions of The Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) offers the comments of four scholars on different aspects of Mironov's work. David L. Ransel introduces the forum with a consideration of whether Russian and western historical scholarship has been or should be converging, and he reviews the Russian-language response to Mironov's book. William G. Wagner discusses Mironov's key conclusions: that the imperial period was marked by the development of a more individualistic personality, the democratic nuclear family, civil society, and a state order based on the rule of law. He questions, however, the validity of the modernization paradigm as an adequate tool for analyzing these developments. Willard Sunderland comments on the use of the concept of empire in Mironov's book, calling attention to the assertion that imperial Russia was a “normal” European state and that it was not a “true colonial state.” The focus of the book, he argues, remains Russian society within the space of the empire, not the society of the empire as a whole. Steven L. Hoch considers Mironov's chapter on demographic processes, criticizing the use of demographic theory and its application to problems such as fertility and mortality. He also argues that Mironov accepts too uncritically the utility of the statistical data at hand. Boris Mironov responds to Wagnar, Sunderland, and Hoch in turn.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) has been hailed by followers in many countries as a forerunner of symbolism, if not as the father of modern poetry tout court. In Russia, Andrei Belyi celebrated him together with Nietzsche in 1909 as a "Patriarkh Simvolizma"; and Valerii Briusov wrote in the same year: "Is it possible to question the importance of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal for the formation of the whole worldview of modernity?" Ellis (L.L. Kobylinskii), the most zealous of all Russian symbolist "Baudelaireans," even tried to convince the menshevik social democrat, N. Valentinov, that Baudelaire was "the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison with whom all Marxes, Engelses, Bakunins, and the rest of the brotherhood which they created, are simply nothing."

The Revival of criminology as a formal discipline in the Soviet Union is raising anew the old Marxist problem of the effect of the environment on the individual. For thirty years following the abolition of the OGPU's Institute for Studying Crime and the Criminal there had been no research facility devoted to studying the causes of crime. Then in 1964 the USSR Public Prosecutor's Office transformed its existing crime-detection research center into the All-Union Institute for Studying the Causes of Crime and Developing Crime-Prevention Methods (hereafter called the Institute for Crime Prevention). Because of its sponsorship it is rather likely that the Institute's senior researchers have access to at least part of the country's largely unpublished crime statistics, hence that they can speak with greater authority than Soviet crime specialists working in the universities and under the Academy of Sciences. It was also in the same year that criminology began to be offered as a subject at Moscow University Law School, and other Soviet law schools have followed suit.

In a society whose ideology asserts that the effect of the environment on the individual is largely known, the effort to isolate particular effects should be of some interest. The assumption that Soviet crime is a product of elements of the capitalist past surviving in the present is strongly reaffirmed by the Institute's director, Igor I. Karpets, and his deputy, Vladimir N. Kudriavtsev. Since by any Soviet definition of “environment” the Soviet citizen is exposed to the socialist present far more than to remnants of the prerevolutionary period, the problem of identifying the “survivals” is coupled with the problem of lack of positive response to the socialist environment by some persons. Karpets seeks these phenomena first of all in the human mind.

Among the most prominent generic signals of Dostoevskii’s The Possessed are those suggesting allegory. Allegory is one of several genres in the novel referred to by name. The narrator characterizes Stepan Trofimovich’s romantic poema as “some sort of allegory” (9) and remarks that, after the most intimate of encounters with his patroness, Stepan Trofimovich would sometimes “jump up from the couch and beat the wall with his fists,” all of which “without the slightest allegory“ (12). Concerning the climax of Iuliia Mikhailovna’s soirée, an allegorical representation of the various literary schools and tendencies of the day, the narrator reports, “It would have been difficult to imagine a more pitiful, tactless, talentless, and vapid allegory than that ‘literary quadrille’” (389). On a more fundamental level, the work’s second epigraph, the passage from the Gospel of Luke describing the exorcism of a possessed man and the flight of the demons into a herd of swine, provides an allegorical foundation for the entire action, projecting the work against biblical history.

A chance archival discovery prompted the question which forms the title of this article. Unfortunately, my attempts to answer the question soon revealed that the attribution to Feofan Prokopovich of the celebrated treatise, Pravda voli monarshei vo opredelenii naslednika derzhavy svoei (The Right of the Monarch’s Will in Designating the Heir to His Realm), rests on sand. In fact, it gradually transpired that nearly every other major work traditionally and for the most part unquestioningly ascribed to Prokopovich is similarly open to doubt. The ramifications of these findings branch throughout the field of early modern Slavic studies, since the Prokopovich of scholarly tradition is one of the most important literary and historical figures of his time (16817-1736) in both Russia and the Ukraine.