When one thinks of Poland in the nineteenth century, the revolutions of 1830 and 1863 come immediately to mind. Yet not all Poles believed that the problem of the relations between Poland and Russia could be resolved only by revolution. There were many who preferred reconciliation. The number in the one camp as against the other at any particular time was a direct reflection of the political atmosphere in Russia. Whenever conditions gave rise to hopes for liberalization and reform among the Russians themselves, the policy of reconciliation would gain adherents among the Poles. This was the case under Alexander I, at the beginning of Alexander IPs reign, and following the revolution of 1905.

Studies of witchcraft belief and persecution in Russia have been profoundly, and to a significant degree mistakenly, shaped by European understandings of witchcraft as fundamentally demonic and integrally linked to the power of the devil. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson's concepts of “prosaics” and “semiotic totalitarianism,” derived from their readings of M. M. Bakhtin, offer a productive way to set imported preconceptions aside and to comprehend the specificities of Muscovite witchcraft beliefs. Pre-Petrine ideas about witchcraft conformed to no uniform, overarching ideological or explanatory schema, satanic or otherwise. Muscovite witchcraft operated instead as a diffuse, resolutely prosaic collection of beliefs and practices, whereas the more demonologically inflected European beliefs approached the imposed uniformity of “semiotic totalitarianism.” In this article, Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen propose a corrective to a widespread propensity for reading Russian material through European paradigms and analyze Russian beliefs on their own, prosaic terms.

The first train line connecting St. Petersburg with western Europe opened in 1862, providing the occasion for Fedor Dostoevskii and Nikolai Leskov to take positions in regard to train travel, cultural traffic, and Russia's insertion into modernity. Anne Dwyer's analysis of Dostoevskii's WinterNotes on Summer Impressionsand Leskov's “From a Travel Diary” reveals an essential paradox. While Leskov is eager to foster the railroad, he switches hats with ease and offers pragmatic performances of an imperial identity based on his competency in the languages of the borderlands. In contrast, the nationalist Dostoevskii fulminates against train travel yet explores the ways in which modernity's onset changes human experience and literary possibilities. Their bifurcated yet equally ambivalent responses to modernity as emblematized by the railroad illuminate the diversity of attempts to articulate a Russian identity in relationship both to Russia's own people(s) and to western Europe in the modern age.

November 2012 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella Odin den Ivana Denisovicha (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich) in the Moscow journal Novyi mir. In this article, Andrew Wachtel considers Solzhenitsyn's pathbreaking work in its original publication context. It examines the editorial preface and the two orthodox contemporary works of Soviet socialist realism the editor chose as bookends for One Day, illustrating the ways in which the surrounding literary context serves to emphasize the socialist realist bona fides of the then unknown Solzhenitsyn. The intertextual links connecting One Day with the works that surround it help to demonstrate that at this point in his career, far from being a dissident, Solzhenitsyn could plausibly be read as an appropriate, albeit unusual, representative of official Soviet literature.