By the late nineteenth century, world's fairs had captured the imagination of Bulgarian political and intellectual elites. Bulgarians were not only enthusiastic pilgrims to the major world's fairs in the west, but by 1892 they had staged their own international trade exhibition in Plovdiv. Here, as elsewhere, the fair phenomenon was an arena for broadcasting messages of national prowess and progress, as well as a context for the performance and contestation of national identity. But for Bulgarians the fair phenomenon at home and abroad was also part of a highly contested process of negotiating its unique place between east and west, politically, economically, and culturally. The tensions and dilemmas that characterized the Plovdiv fair experience were also palpable in Bulgarian participation in fairs abroad, such as the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the St. Louis Fair of 1904, where both the nation and the west were yet again reimagined.

“If words are not about real things and do not cause things to happen,” writes Solzhenitsyn toward the end of the third volume of Gulag Archipelago,“what is the good of them? Are they anything more than the barking of village dogs at night?” He adds parenthetically: “I should like to commend this thought to our modernists: this is how our people usually think of literature. They will not soon lose their habit. Should they, do you think?” The statement— with its flavor of the tag-end of a Russian proverb culled from Dal', even the bit about the village dogs—is characteristic of Solzhenitsyn. What clever critic safe in his armchair, however pricked by ornery oldfangledness, would care or dare to contend with it?

Perhaps the most consistent biographical reference to the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev (1853-1900) concerns his unusual guffaw: “When he laughed, his loud infectious laughter ‘with unexpected, outrageous, and hiccup-like high notes’ would drown out all other voices.” Scholars usually explain this laughter as a sign of Solov‘ev's otherworldly perception and his occasionally inappropriate descent into our mundane realm. Observing this “infectious laughter,” Evgenii Trubetskoi found an explanation in his friend's supposed ethereal character: “He was so nearsighted that he did not see what others saw. Squinting under his thick brows, he could make out items at close range only with difficulty. But when his glance searched into the distance, it seemed to penetrate beyond the surface accessible to our external senses and to see something otherworldly, hidden from all the rest. His eyes shone with some kind of internal light and gazed directly into the soul.” Aleksandr Blok, who claimed to have been greatly affected by a chance meeting with the strange philosopher, called him “pure spirit, as if an image instead of a living man–an outline, a symbol, a sketch.”

“Geopoetics” may be a novel concept for Russian studies, but the term is by no means new. The Scottish poet and critic Kenneth White coined it in 1978, inaugurating an international intellectual and creative movement of the same name that has gained particular momentum in the new millennium. Its urgency in a world that has grown exponentially more connected and networked yet, paradoxically, remains deeply bound to the “iconology of space and place” is evident from the way in which the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, in conversation with Edward Said and others in the symbolically freighted location of Birzeit University in the West Bank, recouped the term as the organizing principle of a special issue of Critical Inquiry in 2000. If anything, geopoetics as an animating force as well an analytical framework for what Mitchell identifies as “social and political life,” “experience,” and “history” appears in even starker relief against the myriad transnational conflicts that define the globe in 2016 within which, in turn, the region we study has been rapidly redefining itself vis-à-vis the world.

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.

The ways in which members of a community think, act, or believe are always changing. Sometimes the pace of change is imperceptibly slow; at other times it is so rapid that it can distinguish an era from its recent past. The rural communities of Bulgaria have experienced rapid change over the last three decades. It began on September 9, 1944, when the Bulgarian monarchy was overthrown and the Bulgarian Communist Party emerged to lead Bulgaria on a path of socialist development. The seizure of power was a revolutionary act but, more important, from a sociological point of view, it was an act that made revolutionary change possible. My purpose is to illustrate several ways in which Bulgarian rural communities have participated in the revolutionary transformation of community and family life in the 1970s.