In "The Whisper of History and the Noise of Time in the Writings of Osip Mandel'shtam" Gregory Freidin writes that "only a cultural orphan growing up in the revolutionary years could possess such an insatiable need for a continuous construction of a gigantic vision of culture meant to compensate for the impossibility of belonging to a single place." Freidin's richly suggestive remark hints at both the nature of and the reasons for Mandel'shtam's "orphandom," and the means by which he sought to surmount or circumvent his pervasive homelessness and achieve a "homeland, a house, a hearth" in culture.

Among the problematic works of great writers, Pushkin's Boris Godunov occupies a special place. This strange hybrid of history, drama, narrative poetry, and prose Pushkin called a “romantic tragedy,” and he considered it his masterpiece. Yet the play's publication in 1831 was met with surprise and dismay. By consensus of a baffled public, Boris Godunov was a failure—neither romantic, nor feasible on the tragic stage.

Since that time, generations of critics, playwrights, and producers have tried to come to terms with this troublesome text. Tolstoi's famous comment—that all great nineteenth-century Russian works defy clear generic classification1—has been invoked in defense of many irregular texts, but not this one. Boris remains stubbornly, inexplicably “undramatic.” Criticism has in fact tended to redefine the play rather than to investigate it. Boundaries are routinely blurred between the historical Tsar Boris, the historical period when his tale is retold, and the world of the fictional creation itself.

The article reconstructs the ambivalence of the relationship of Czech society to the Habsburg monarchy and its legacy. While this period can be retrospectively contrasted with the twentieth century as a time of relative stability, it is also recognized in Czech collective memory as a time of national subalternity and inequality. Sometimes the imperial legacy is also blamed for the absence of civic virtues in Czech political culture. The study traces the roots of these Czech approaches in the thought of Czech historian and national leader František Palacký (who proposed federalist reform of the empire) and the ideas of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk (who declared “de-Austrianization” to be a doctrine of the new state as well as a basis for new civic virtues). The essay also touches on popular culture images in Hašek΄s Schweik and the phenomenon of Jára da Cimrman, which contribute to an ambivalent and infantilizing image of the times of empire.

By most accounts, the Russian Revolution began on February 23, 1917 with the women's strike for bread and suffrage. Yet for the next thirteen years (until 1930), that revolutionary beginning was celebrated on March 12, after which it was expunged from the revolutionary calendar altogether. “International Women's Day” meanwhile became March 8 because of the change in the Russian calendar in 1918 (it had been 13 days behind the European calendar), and February 23 became “Red Army Day” and subsequently (in 2006), “Day of the Defender of the Fatherland.” Over the course of the early 1920s, the connection between the women's strike on February 23/March 8 and the February Revolution was actively undermined in several ways. First, the February Revolution itself was dated not from the moment when women marched in the streets of Petrograd calling out the men to strike, but rather from March 12 (February 27), which was the day of the founding of the Temporary Committee of the State Duma, soon to become the Provisional Government. Second, the celebration of the two holidays of Red Army Day on February 23 and International Women's Day on March 8 created a split between men and women in their celebrations, separating them and assigning spheres to each, the army for men and the home for women. Finally, the creation of February 23 as the anniversary of the Red Army's founding seems to have deliberately upstaged both women's involvement in the 1917 Revolution and the overthrow of autocracy.

Anthropogenic climate change necessitates rethinking the role of academic scholarship. This article addresses the question of Soviet subjecthoods from the perspective of one's affective connection to natural environments, while keeping in mind the multiscalarity of subjecthood. It traces a genealogy of environmentally-attuned selfhoods in the late Soviet-era sociocultural imagination and positions this model within the context of present-day understandings of subjecthood in Soviet studies. Soviet-era subjects did not make sense of their lives, aims and accomplishments solely in relation to the Soviet state, but also in relation to things closer at hand and in relation to ideas and conditions of a global and planetary scale. In Alberts Bels's and Jaan Kaplinski's writings, the environmentally conscious subject emerges as multiscalar: a subject who identifies both with its direct, affectively experienced environment, but who also realizes the boundedness of local, global, and planetary processes. The ethical attitude of reverence for life, promoted by Albert Schweitzer, together with the widely shared concern about both local-level environmental damage and the future of the planet provide the context for late Soviet multiscalar naturecultural subjecthood.

In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii's poem “To the Workers of Kursk” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anamoly (KMA). Rozhkov's series for Maiakovskii's ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov's less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii's poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Bošković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s—socialist realism.

This essay explores the unique challenge the proliferation of adjunct labor in higher education poses to efforts at eliminating racial bias and promoting diversity in our field. Relying on published research and personal experience, I argue that the pervasive exploitation of contingent labor makes academic careers, particularly in far-flung fields such as Slavic studies, unattractive to many college graduates from the Black community, a large portion of which considers education a meritocratic means of escaping intergenerational poverty. Because the economic, social, and cultural inequalities at play in determining who obtains a tenure-track job fly in the face of this myth of meritocracy so fundamental to historic Black hopes for socioeconomic mobility, I call for a reckoning with adjunctification as a critical first step to addressing racial bias and ensuring inclusivity in our field.

Prior to his influential seminars on G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the 1930s, the philosopher Alexandre Kojève was still Aleksandr Kozhevnikov, a recent émigré to Germany who studied the philosophy of Vladimir Solov΄ev in Heidelberg. As a result, Kojève published several articles in French and German on Solov΄ev's philosophy of history and divine Sophia. While he soon developed his own reputation as a celebrated philosopher, posthumously published works such as Atheism (1931) and the forthcoming publication of a manuscript written in 1940 and devoted once more to “Sophia,” suggest that his engagement with Russian religious philosophy was more protracted than previously considered. This article outlines the uniqueness of Kojève's interpretation of Sophia, from his initial interest in Solov΄ev's philosophy, through to his secularization of the concept in Atheism, and ultimately his “return” to Russian philosophy, when he writes a treatise on Sophia in Russian to be sent to Stalin himself.

The article examines the de-Stalinization of war veterans’ organizations in Czechoslovakia. Building on testimonies and journalistic works concerning the victims of Stalinist purges and persecution and the attempts to rehabilitate them, the author elaborates her argument with the case study of the prominent war victims’ organization “Association of Antifascist Fighters”. During Stalinism, all veterans who had not fought side by side with the Soviet Union were treated with suspicion and often expelled from the veterans’ association. In the framework of the reform socialist experiment of the 1960s, the country's Stalinist heritage of violence was largely rejected. What made the Czechoslovak reform socialist approach unique was its distancing from the Soviet influence on Czechoslovak communist tradition. In this way, Stalinism, and the violence that accompanied it, was turned into a Soviet matter, while the national communist tradition was to be cured of the effects of this influence.

Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals felt themselves cut off from the uneducated masses and thought the gap could be bridged by some form of harmo niouscivilization. In Russia, a new liberalism spread after 1811-15, when young Russian officers returned from Germany and France, and culminated in the December, 1825, uprising. Less political, but much more numerous and influential, were the young philosophers who discovered the old Greek authors, Voltaire, and Hegel.

In the summer of 1812, through the efforts of Bettine Brentano, a meeting took place in Teplitz between Beethoven and Goethe. Beethoven describes it in a letter to Bettine:

Liebe gute Bettine! Könige und Füirsten können wohl Professoren machen und Geheimeräthe &. und Titel und Ordensbänder umhängen, aber groβe Menschen können sie nicht machen, Geister, die über das Weltgeschmeib hervorragen, das müssen sie wohl bleiben lassen zu machen, und damit muβ man sie in Respect halten; wenn so zwei zusammen kommen, wie ich und der Goethe, da müssen auch grobe Herren merken, was bei unser Einem als groβ gelten kann.