Publications

“Catherine the Great: A Reference Guide to Her Life and Works has an extensive A to Z section which includes several hundred entries. The bibliography provides a comprehensive list of publications concerning her life and work”

Late Imperial Russia’s multifaceted presence in Persia retains many fascinating life-stories of its actors, who often exerted crucial influence on the course of the history of Russian-Iranian relations of the time. Drawing on international scholarship about the Russian-Iranian relationships at the turn of the twentieth century, but mostly on documents from Russian and Georgian archives and the diaries of his contemporaries as well as his own private notes, this article examines the activities of Seraia Shapshal (1873-1961), focusing on his embeddedness both in the Qajar court and in Late Imperial Russia’s policy towards Iran during the period 1900 to 1908. The paper for the first time in Iranian studies sheds light in sufficient detail upon how Shapshal found himself in Persia and what enabled him to reach the highest levels of power at the Qajar court. In so doing, it also identifies his leading role in the June 1908 anti-constitution coup.

An Interview with Professor Teresa Obolevitch, Chair of Russian and Byzantine Philosophy at the Pontifical University of Joun Paul II in Krakow

The Festschrift containing 37 contributions celebrates the scholarly achievements of the two outstanding Assyriologists, Walter Sommerfeld (University of Marburg) and Manfred Krebernik (University of Jena). The primary focus of the volume corresponds to the main topics of interests of Professors Sommerfeld and Krebernik – Pre-Sargonic and Sargonic Mesopotamia and third millennium Syria. The volume also features a few contributions dealing with Sumerian language, Mesopotamian literature and the early history of Akkadian and its Semitic background.

‪The article discusses the late 18th century Russian outdoor performances and demonstrates that “theatrical” techniques of staging power in eighteenth-century Russia were used for political purposes. The victory over the Ottoman Empire was celebrated by a grand open-air performance festival in Moscow in 1775 whose intention was to demonstrate not only the monarch’s power over her enemies, external as well as internal, but also the claim that the Russian empress Catherine II is able to transform nature as if it were nothing but a theater coulisse.

In this paper, I attempt to compare the relative rates of replacement of basic vocabulary items (from the 100-item Swadesh list) over four specific checkpoints in the history of the Chinese language: Early Old Chinese (as represented by documents such as The Book of Songs), Classic Old Chinese, Late Middle Chinese (represented by the language of The Record of Linji), and Modern Chinese. After a concise explication of the applied methodology and a detailed presentation of the data, it is shown that the average rates of replacement between each of these checkpoints do not significantly deviate from each other and are generally compatible with the classic «Swadesh constant» of 0.14 loss per millennium; furthermore, these results correlate with other similar observed situations, e.g. for the Greek language, though not with others (Icelandic). It is hoped that future similar studies on the lexical evolution of languages with attested written histories will allow to place these observations into a more significant context.

Catherine ii’s foreign policy has been traditionally considered very successful. She won three wars and incorporated large territories into the Russian Empire making her country one of Europe’s great powers. But arguments for this kind of evaluation miss Catherine’s own perspective. The article argues that the empress failed to reach any of the initial goals she had put forward. Her foreign policy lacked a considered long-term strategy and from the very start was characterized by a series of mistakes. Catherine did turn Russia into a great power but with quite a different reputation from what she initially had planned.

Some conceptual and methodological foundations of effective construction of active media for innovative development are developed in the article. The ideas of global evolutionism (or universal evolutionism), ecology understood in an extended sense, emergentism, time management, and the constructing the desirable futures are used as methodologically key ones. Evolutionism is understood in a broader sense than in the Darwin era, when it included the idea of ​​multiplying the primary diversity of elements of living media and natural selection of the most viable forms of life based on this diversity. The modern evolutionism is founded mostly on the theory of complexity and non-linear dynamics and includes the ideas cyclical evolution which is uneven in its pace, the appearance of emergent properties of systems at different hierarchical levels that come into existence in the course of evolution, the mutual activity of a system and its environment (active adaptation and enactive behavior), the possibility and expediency of the influence of subjects of social action and management on the course of evolutionary processes in complex active media (the choice of favorable evolutionary paths near points of instability, construction of trends, future management).

There is published a female burial in the catacomb 1119 of Ust’-Al’ma necropolis situated on the southwestern shore of the Crimea. There are found personal jewellery (gold ear-rings, amphora-pendants and beads of a necklace, sewn plaques) as well as grave goods (gold leaves of a funeral wreath, gold eye-pieces, two hand-formed ceramic incense-burners, a ceramic jug, an iron knife, a ceramic unguentarium of the bulbous type, a ceramic red-slip bowl, two ceramic spindle-whorls). The grave might belong to a representative of social elite, and dates to the period from the first half to the middle of the 1st century AD.

This contribution offers to the readers a publication and translation (with linguistic and philological commentaries) of a recently discovered piece of Old Amharic poetry, possibly dating to the first half/middle of the 17th century. The published text bears the title Märgämä kəbr (“Condemnation of glory”), but its content differs from that of several other Old Amharic poems (not entirely independent from each other) known under the same title. It is only the general idea and the main topics that are shared by all Märgämä kəbr poems: transience of the earthly world, the inevitability of death and of God’s judgement, and the necessity of leading virtuous life.

One can thus speak of Märgämä kəbr as a special genre of early Amharic literature, probably originally belonging to the domain of oral literature and used to address the Christian community with the aim of religious education and admonition of the laymen.

This is the first commented critical edition of two Latin treatises by Michael Scot, astrologer and translator at the court of Frederick II, first third of XIIIth century. It is provided by an extensive historical and philological introduction.

In America today, two communities with sub-Saharan African genetic origins exist side by side, though they have differing histories and positions within society. This book explores the relationship between African Americans, descendants of those Africans brought to America as slaves, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who have come to the United States of America voluntarily, mainly since the 1990s. Members of these groups have both a great deal in common and much that separates them, largely hidden in their assumptions about, and attitudes towards, each other. In a work grounded in extensive fieldwork Bondarenko and his research team interviewed African Americans, and migrants from twenty-three African States and five Caribbean nations, as well as non-black Americans involved with African Americans and African migrants. Seeking a wide range of perspectives, from different ages, classes and levels of education, they explored the historically rooted mutual images of African Americans and contemporary African migrants, so as to understand how these images influence the relationship between them. In particular, they examined conceptions of ‘black history’ as a common history of all people and nations with roots in Africa. What emerges is a complex picture. While collective historical memory of oppression forges solidarity, lack of knowledge of each other’s history can create distance between communities. African migrants tend to define their identities not by race, but on the basis of multiple layers of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic affinities (of which African Americans are often unaware). For African Americans, however, although national and regional identities are important, it is above all race that is the defining factor. While drawing on wider themes from anthropology and African studies, this in-depth study on a little-researched subject allows valuable new understandings of contemporary American society.

In the 1970s and 80s, Soviet sociology published a great deal about women's empowerment in the USSR. Researchers emphasized two sides of this phenomenon: on one hand the achievements of the state in equalizing the rights of women with those of men, along with the high levels of women's employment and participation in public life, and on the other hand the ensuing "double burden," resulting from the need to combine a career with the "traditional" duties of a spouse, mother and housewife

Previous studies of migrants from Central Asia living and working in Russia suggest that their life is characterized by limited resources and social exclusion. Heavy physical work, cramped living conditions, poor nutrition, lack of health insurance and scarce information about medical infrastructure are the barriers on migrants' way to timely and quality medical care. Moreover, limited access to healthcare is aggravated by negative attitudes and discriminatory practices that migrants face when visiting state hospitals and polyclinics of Moscow. In this study, we first aim to describe medical infrastructure available for the migrants in Moscow. Second, we have a goal to investigate how migrants use formal and informal strategies to overcome the barriers on their way to receiving medical care in the urban environment. The study is based on the analysis of qualitative interviews with 23 caregivers working in Moscow-based medical facilities such as state hospitals, polyclinics, and ambulance stations, private medical centers including the so called Kyrgyz clinics.

This article answers the question of how contemporary Russian TV series portray the police. The results derive from a single-case thematic and functionalist study of the popular Russian TV series Glukhar’ (which aired from 2008 to 2011). The show merits special attention because it was on air when the Russian police were undergo- ing a legitimacy crisis, which lead to the 2009 police reform. The series recognized the crisis and responded to it with a set of justifications. I analyze the show’s social and cultural contexts, its plot patterns, and the functions of its characters. I build a typology of justifications and claim that the show justifies the police through an open discussion about the reasons for and consequences of their lawlessness. The series shows that the legitimacy of the police is repeatedly questioned, but trust in the police is always restored because police officers are depicted as estranged from the state but not from the community. Thus, the show contains an interesting example of overcoming a legitimacy crisis through its recognition. The study opens the floor to further discussions about how popular culture resolves intense social debates about policing by symbolic means in a moment when police legitimacy is contested.

 

The article discusses the corpus of Dmtri Prigov's manifestoes, articles, and programmatic interviews as a manifestation of a coherent theoretical concept. The author of the article argues that Prigov's theoretical ideas are structured in accordance with his own central artistic category-for which, oddly enough, he did not have a common name. The author refers to this category as performativity, although Prigov himself did not use this word, preferring to discuss the behavioral level, operational modes, characters, images (imidzhi), and so on. Performativity, in this interpretation, permeates the totality of an artistic practice, without exception. Texts, paintings, installations, actual performances, and any public utterance-interviews, for example-become "traces" of performative behavior. It is along these lines that one can speak about the performative life of the contemporary author, about the "behavior that is to be found within a non-playful art form, in which the typical type of conventional professional language does not imply (or rather, until the relevant time period, did not imply) the appearance of the creator, who by his presence relativizes the very value, durability, uniqueness, and self-sufficiency of the language of the objects he made." It is from this perspective that the author discusses the overarching meaning of Prigov's oeuvre as the grandiose mockery of societal cultural practices rather than a collection of self-sufficient works. This approach also elucidates Prigov's programmatic self-modeling as the trickster who can only fulfill the performative as the central category of contemporary culture. © 2016 The Russian Review.

Dynastic Power And Name-Giving Principles In Kievan And Muscovite Rus’ (10th - 16th Centuries)

The book includes 459 phrases that will help Russian learners of English to succeed in job interviews and write effective CVs, cover letters, and follow-up letters.

In 1945 Europe was a vast graveyard. The diaspora of the dead was perhaps most prominent in Germany, where the fallen of the four occupying forces, as well as other nationals, were spread across the country. As the allies worked through the postwar settlement with Germany and its allies, they considered another pressing question: How to treat the dead? This presentation explores how the dead became a point of contact, conflict and contrast in Germany that provide a window into the dynamics of power sharing between the occupiers. The politics of the sacred demanded that each of the four allies enter into uneasy interactions and compromises, even as the lines in the Cold War hardened.

The study explores the parameters and factors of internationalization of Russian historical science in 2000–2015. Through a bibliometric analysis of publications and journals from the Web of Science database the study assesses the overall representation of Russian historians in the international scientific community, and determines the usability of journal databases for the research of effectiveness of internationalization strategies.

In addition to the quantitative indicators (the number of publications and references), this research sets qualitative features of the articles of Russian historians: distribution by the type of the journal, top themes, changes in the content of publications during the analyzed period, as well as comparative profiling of the historians' publication activity per research and educational institutions, and countries.

Sheremetev’s Almshouse was the first private institution of social welfare in Russia which openly proclaimed that not all the poor deserved relief and exposed the applicants to inspections by the administrators. The study demonstrates that the recipients of the Almshouse relief did not belong to the lowest tiers of Moscow population but originated from its middle stratum. They were clerks and ranked officials, the military of middle ranks, and priests, or their families. Considerable number of them had additional sources of income before they obtained allowances from the Almshouse, only for a few of them the relief was crucial for survival. This paradox can be explained by examining the reports on the recipients written by an administrator of the Almshouse. The document reveals that the Almshouse supported those Moscow dwellers who were involved in the network of patronage or were connected by the relations of military or civil service with the administration of the Almshouse and with Moscow aristocracy. The support from the patrons served a better guarantee for the Almshouse’s administration than the evidences of the neighbours or relatives. On the basis of the unearthed archival documents, the study brings out that the Almshouse was an institution deeply rooted in the Moscow patronage and protective network which connected people of middle stratum and the aristocracy. Selecting recipients of relief, the administration of the Almshouse was guided by the logic of privilege and assertion of status opposed to economic definitions of poverty.

The policy of the Stalinist leadership in Georgia in the post-war period reflected both the general norms of the Stalinist ‘center-periphery’ system as well as certain specific informal political factors. This article examine the implementation in Georgia of a key principle of Stalinist regional policy: strict control over leading personnel, including the use of repression. The fullest expression of this principle was the so-called ‘Mingrelian Affair’. The emergence and course of the Mingrelian Affair was also closely linked to particular informal factors: the involvement of Stalin in Georgian affairs and the mechanisms of patronage (shevtsvo), and in the Georgian case, the patronage of Beria. The significance and concrete manifestations of these factors will also be analyzed. The ending of the mass terror following the death of Stalin could not help but have a certain effect on the regional and nomenklatura policies of the top Soviet leaders. The second half of this article consider the changes that took place in the practical interactions between the center and the Georgian leadership after the death of Stalin, and also after the arrest of the ‘boss’ of Georgia,  Beria. An important component part of the center’s policy towards Georgia was a focus on Georgian nationalism. The essence of this understanding under Stalin and its modification in the post-Stalin period, as well as an examination of available materials sent to Moscow about the manifestations of Georgian nationalism, are a constant theme running throughout the article.

The article is dedicated to the sensational discovery of five Gothic graffiti in the Mountainous Crimea where the use of the Gothic language was attested by the sources, but never in written form. The graffiti are scratched on two re-used fragments of early Byzantine cornice from the Mangup Basilica and dated to the 2nd half of the 9th – 10th  centuries. Two of them are typical Byzantine invocations, one is a commemoration (?) with a formula of modesty, one is barely survived, and one contains a quotation from Ps 76, 14-15 and a liturgical (probably Gothic poetic) text. The inscriptions are written in archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet. The discovered graffiti are of great importance not only for the history of the Crimean Goths and their language, but also for the history of Gothic writing and culture in general.The article is dedicated to the sensational discovery of five Gothic graffiti in the Mountainous Crimea where the use of the Gothic language was attested by the sources, but never in written form. The graffiti are scratched on two re-used fragments of early Byzantine cornice from the Mangup Basilica and dated to the 2nd half of the 9th – 10th  centuries. Two of them are typical Byzantine invocations, one is a commemoration (?) with a formula of modesty, one is barely survived, and one contains a quotation from Ps 76, 14-15 and a liturgical (probably Gothic poetic) text. The inscriptions are written in archaic variant of Wulfila’s alphabet. The discovered graffiti are of great importance not only for the history of the Crimean Goths and their language, but also for the history of Gothic writing and culture in general.

After examinating the text of the Golden Bull of 1356 the author proposes quite new points concerning the nature and aims of this document.

This study employs a unique database covering 2,293 cadets who graduated from the Noble Land Cadet Corps in St Petersburg from 1732 – 1762 to investigate the role of cultural capital in early modern Russia. Our analysis suggests that within this sample cultural capital was negatively correlated with wealth, but positively with father’s rank within the state service. At the corps itself, wealth and social status of families did not directly affect the success of their sons. The only significant factor of success at this school (promotion to a particular rank at graduation) was the family’s access to “Western” education and cultural skills. The results indicate the state was able to create an institutional framework where the possession of new “imported” knowledge and social skills gave the holder a measurable advantage over his peers. This could be considered one of the mechanisms which contributed to the sustainability of the cultural and social regime created by Peter I.

An abundance of variants devised according to the plot concerning the Contempt for Byzantine Gold can be identified as the Scandinavian background to the Russian and Byzantine examples. In Rus, we only encounter a particular variant in the story of Prince Sviatoslav and its interpretation in the story of his descendant and namesake – Prince Sviatoslav, son of Iaroslav the Wise. Thus, the assumption that the plot in the Rus chronicle, so rare in Rus, became popular in Scandinavia, remains tenable. Much more likely, however, is the view that in Scandinavia the description of the correct form of behaviour for the ruler during trials by foreign gift-giving had a long history in the form of oral stories. One of the variants of such a story, evidently, served as the basis for the story of Prince Sviatoslav’s meeting with the envoys of the Byzantine emperor.

La parution du premier tome de la correspondance de Catherine II et Friedrich Melchior Grimm vient couronner une entreprise de longue haleine dirigée par Sergueï Karp, l’édition critique des lettres échangées entre 1764 à 1796 par l’impératrice russe avec le directeur de la Correspondance littéraire. Les lettres contenues dans ce volume sont en effet précieuses pour éclairer les relations entre l’Impératrice et le milieu philosophique et artistique. Durant toute cette période, Grimm – auquel la souveraine s’adresse avec familiarité sur le mode de la conversation, en un français parfois truffé de remarques en allemand – circule une grande partie du temps entre la Russie, les Provinces- Unies, l’Italie, puis de nouveau la Russie, la Suède et le Danemark avant de revenir en France à la fin de l’année 1777. Il s’affirme de plus en plus comme « un intermédiaire essentiel dans les relations culturelles » de Catherine II avec l’Occident, particulièrement dans le domaine des arts, se chargeant de traiter avec les artistes, les intermédiaires et les marchands, à Paris et à Rome, pour le compte de la tsarine.

The article analyzes the process of establishing phisical boundaries and legal status of land property in Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. The main topics include interaction of educated elite (landlords, government officials) with peasants, image of a land surveyor in public thought and fiction, difficulties with constructing private property regime in the countryside.

Reconstructed on the base of the lawsuit over the legacy, the history of the family and kinship relations of the retired State Councillor Avraam Stepanovich Sverchkov ( he was the key person in the legislative commissions in 1720s – early 1740s and in 1755 bequeathed a considerable part of his property to the newly established Moscow University ) suggests that only a nuclear family existed and had value for the category of bureaucrats he belonged to. Coming from unprivileged estates and not being members of chancellery service families these persons climbed the hierarchy ladder thanks to their professional skills, and independently built their careers, friendships, matrimonial and other strategies, advancing in their service due to personal contacts, knowledge and experience. Being involved in the actual implementation of authorities’ reformative initiatives in the first half of the eighteenth century, Sverchkov and clerks like him formed the higher level of office employees in a variety of central institutions and ensured undisturbed operation of all the units of the state machine. Acquiring hereditary nobility through their service, this kind of collegiate officials shaped the field of social and family interaction within a single nuclear family rather than on the basis of vertical kinship relations. Their social capital, career progress, material well-being and security were interrelated and depended on two generations (parents and children) having been integrated in a complex system of social contacts.

In the Great Terror of 1937–38 more than a million Soviet citizens were arrested or killed for political crimes they didn’t commit. What kind of people carried out this violent purge, and what motivated them? This book opens up the world of the Soviet perpetrator for the first time. Focusing on Kuntsevo, the Moscow suburb where Stalin had a dacha, Alexander Vatlin shows how Stalinism rewarded local officials for inventing enemies. Agents of Terror reveals stunning, detailed evidence from archives available for a limited time in the 1990s. Going beyond the central figures of the terror, Vatlin takes readers into the offices and interrogation rooms of secret police at the district level. Spurred at times by ambition, and at times by fear for their own lives, agents rushed to fulfill quotas for arresting “enemies of the people” —even when it meant fabricating the evidence. Vatlin pulls back the curtain on a Kafkaesque system, forcing readers to reassess notions of historical agency and moral responsibility in Stalin-era crimes.

Stanford University

March 27, 2017 – March 29, 2017

 

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, is pleased to present the 2017 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Monday through Wednesday, March 27–29, 2017 at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows:

AI for the Social Good Computational Construction Grammar and Natural Language Understanding Computational Context: Why It's Important, What It Means, and Can It Be Computed? Designing the User Experience of Machine Learning Systems Interactive Multisensory Object Perception for Embodied Agents Learning from Observation of Humans Science of Intelligence: Computational Principles of Natural and Artificial Intelligence Wellbeing AI: From Machine Learning to Subjectivity Oriented Computing

This contribution consists of three parts. The first section is dedicated to a description of the complementizer system in Russian, whereas the second and the third section describe the same aspects of Polish and Bulgarian – though not in the same detail as for Russian. In the Russian part, the set of Russian complementizers is considered, each of them is described in short, and, finally, some problematic cases of multifunctional units are also mentioned.

 

ninteresting feature of Russian is its rich system of composed markers (those with the correlative to or with the subjunctive marker by) which in fact can be analyzed either as complex complementizers (this is more plausible for by-variants) or as combinations of markers (this seems to be plausible for to-variants).

Interestingly, Russian has no specialized complementizers, such as Polish że having only a complementizer use. All of the Russian markers analyzed also have other uses. Sometimes, as with polysemous adverbial clause markers kogda ‘when’, esli ‘if’ and the purpose marker čtoby ‘(in order) to’, the word order can serve as a distinctive feature: in the complementizer use, these units (and, correspondingly, the embedded clause itself) have a fixed position after the main clause, which is not true for adverbial uses. This fact confirms (at least for kogda and esli) the tendency observed for many languages: if a marker is used as a complementizer and as another type of subordinator, the complementizer use is often secondary, a result of grammaticalization.

 

Anniversary collection of articles in honor of L.I.Sobolev includes works by his disciples and colleagues covering a broad range of the phililogical issues: the problems of Russian literature, European literature of the Middle Ages and of the 19 -20 centures, corpus linguistics, linguistic analysis of the literary texts, the questions of teaching of Russian literature at school.

The book consists of the three parts: scientific study, works on pedagogy and bibliografy of L. Sobolev prepared by A. Sobolev.

The book contains works of famous Russian critics and linguists, professors of leading Russian universities as well as articles by well-known teachers of Moscow schools, especially the gymnasium 1567.

This book explores developments in the three major societies of the South Caucasus – Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia – focusing especially on religion, historical traditions, national consciousness, and political culture, and on how these factors interact. It outlines how, despite close geographical interlacement, common historical memories and inherited structures, the three countries have deep differences; and it discusses how development in all three nations has differed significantly from the countries’ declared commitments to democratic orientation and European norms and values. The book also considers how external factors and international relations continue to impact on the three countries.

Hegel’s anthropology is not just a doctrine of the human soul, feeling, and the subconscious, and not just the foundational section of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit as it took its final shape in the philosopher’s Berlin years. It is also, among many other things, a tale of resistance – of how the natural and the bodily resist their ‘idealization’ by Geist but ultimately become an ‘assimilated’ part of Geist (both ‘idealization’ and ‘assimilation’, as well as occasionally ‘resistance’, being Hegel’s own terms), although not without generating multiple moments of smaller, and more subtle, resistances and counter-resistances along the way. The goal of this chapter is not to address or question this assimilatory narrative of Hegel’s anthropological idealism as such, but to elucidate the more important of those moments and to introduce the anthropological logic of resistance as it permeates and runs through Hegel’s anthropology. To that end, I first turn to the inaugurative event of the anthropology in    Hegel, that of the birth of Geist in its distinction from Natur, considered as a moment of resistance (against the natural) and transformation (of the natural). Next, I analyze the logic of anthropological subjectivity as it is developed further by Hegel through individuation and subjectivation, and argue that idealization is closely tied to resistance via the logic of the body and "self-feeling." Finally, I provide a reading of two of the anthropology’s culminating moments, madness and habit, which I take to be resisting each other within the two-center structure of subjectivity that Hegel puts forward. Taken together, these moments help uncover a motif of resistance running through the entire logic of Hegel's anthropology.

This paper argues that Wittgenstein opposed theories of meaning, and did so for good reason. Theories of meaning, in the sense discussed here, are attempts to explain what makes it the case that certain sounds, shapes, or movements are meaningful linguistic expressions. It is widely believed that Wittgenstein made fundamental contributions to this explanatory project. I argue, by contrast, that in both his early and later work, Wittgenstein endorsed a disjunctivist conception of language which rejects the assumption underlying the question that such theories seek to answer—namely, the assumption that the notion of a meaningful linguistic expression admits of non-circular analysis. Moreover, I give two arguments in favor of the view I ascribe to Wittgenstein: one based on later Wittgenstein’s discussion of meaning skepticism, and one based on considerations concerning the identity of linguistic expressions.

Acting rationally and consistently with the demands of biological instincts seems to be the overall norm for humans. Still, there are thinkers who have shown that in a deeper sense, this is not an absolute norm at all and there are exclusions that should be taken into account if we wish to understand the true nature of a human. These thinkers, in particular, are Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) and Max Scheler (1874 - 1928). In this article, I depict the peculiarities of each of the authors’ views on freedom of will and action, and, at the same time, I will show that their ideas are implicitly similar. Dostoevsky did not know Scheler, of course; it is likely that Scheler read some of Dostoevsky’s work, although Scheler does not cite him.

The article considers a fundamental contradiction between a hypertrophied desire to freely pursue one's goals and the insuperability of fate that is inherent in Mikhail Lermontov's novel Hero of Our Time [Geroi nashego vremeni] in which the drive for “freedom” precipitates meaningless rebellion. The collision between thought (awareness contradiction) and the vital impulse (élan vital) causes the identity of the hero to split: thought turns out to be fruitless and life hopeless. This contradiction is symptomatic of cultural degeneration, and of the transformation of cultural values into “simulacra”—the “superfluous man” is a simulacrum of identity.

This review article is the analysis of recent historiography on the issue of military efficiency of the Russian officer corps in 1800–1914. The author reviews three monographs published not long ago (Gudrun Persson's book on Russian military thinking of the second part of the 19th century, John W. Steinberg's research on Russian General Staff in late 19th – early 20th century and Dmitrii Kopelev's study of the German party in the Russian Navy and Fleet) and gives an interpretation of academic research of the theme, approaches applied and findings presented.

The article investigates how Leo Tolstoy’s economic ideas are embodied in the plot of his short-story “Polikushka” (1863). Research shows that the fluctuation in the name of a sum of money the protagonist Polikey loses can be explained by the “double exchange rate“ of the ruble, i.e the lag between the rate of the silver ruble and assignation ruble (1:3.5) which existed in Russia from 1839 to 1851. As the main character loses the paper (called “devilish” in the drafts) money, “Polikushka” fits into the ramified European literary mythology of banknotes as the tricks of the devil. In addition to European parallels, the article discusses possible Russian plot sources dating back to Nekrasov’s poetry and the prose of Pogodin, Potekhin and Dostoevsky. In the second section, the article explores the narrative patterns of the story and demonstrates that it is impossible to see the reason for Polikey’s death only as his mistress’ desire to test and rehabilitate him. The narration is organized as a network of mutually exclusive viewpoints, correlation of which develops an ugly portrait of both the old landlady and Polikey, equally guilty in the tragic ending of the story. In the last two sections, the article reveals the ideological underpinnings of such a skeptical Tolstoy’s view on communication between peasants and the educated elite in his pedagogical writings of 1861-62. Here Tolstoy wrote how harmful philanthropy, wrong education, false ideology and unreasonable circulation of money could be for peasants. In conclusion, the article offers a possible source for Tolstoy’s viewpoint in the political and economic ideas of P.-J. Proudhon, with whom Tolstoy communicated in Brussels when writing “Polikushka”.

This paper is devoted to the influence of Chodasevič’s poetic technique on Mandel´štam’s poetry. In this work we make an attempt to analyze Mandel´štam’s late Novye stichi (“Ne govori nikomu…”, “Kuda kak strašno nam s toboj…” and “My s toboj na kuchne posidim…”), which are connected to each other through the theme of fear. From the point of view of the poetic technique, these texts are also connected to each other through the literary device of the unexpected twist of meaning, which was associated with Chodasevič’s lyrics in Mandel´štam’s consciousness.

Leskov researchers have often and justifiably focussed on the influence of Old Russian literature and folklore in his prose. However, 19th century Russian literature is equally essential to his work. Leskov often borrowed plot devices, images, and names from his contemporaries; these aspects of his work, namely his 'intertextuality' and literature-centrism are under-appreciated. This paper demonstrates this aspect of his poetics using his play The Spendthrift, showing that The Spendthirft presents a combination of allusions to 19th century works including A.S. Griboedov's Woe From Wit, N.V. Gogol's The Inspector General, A.N. Ostrovsky's Krechinsky's Wedding and A.V. Sukovo-Kobylin's The Case. Using the terminology of postmodernism, the term "pastiche" may be rightfully applied to Leskov's play. Whereas in postmodern art, pastiche is the result of the author's frustration with everything already having been written, Leskov uses others' texts for polemical purposes with the intention of formulating his own literary position.

The paper traces the very different contours of Soviet discourses of Arctic in the Stalinists 1930s with their narrative transformation of Arctic space into integral part of national Soviet space. The goal is to see how the Arctic narrative developed and evolved throughout the last 30/40 years of the Soviet era. The research is based on analysis of 3000 literary texts, articles, memoirs and letters, published and archived. The results confirm the presence of ‘Arctic discourse’ in the Soviet society and is supported by various sources. The Arctic issue became per- manent in cultural and political practices of the time in the late 1920s and had a series of cli- maxes in the 1930s–1940s. Its popularity peaked in the mid-1950s and then dropped dramatical- ly. The cultural and literary background of such change is explored through the narrative definitions. 

This article revisits Joseph Stalin’s infamous 1950 critique of Nikolai Marr’s controversial linguistic theory as a “linguistic turn,” to borrow a modern concept. The authors argue that this was literally a shift in the language describing social diversity, rather than a purely ideological campaign as earlier studies suggested. Stalin explicitly insisted on the academic nature of his intervention, which was quite banal in terms of its theoretical input, reproducing standard theses of classic linguistic theory from prerevolutionary textbooks. One aspect, however, was both theoretical and original: the elaborate attack on the concept of “crossing” (skreshchenie) of languages as the driving force of linguistic processes, the central and most stable element of the evolving theory of Nikolai Marr and his disciples. By reviewing the intellectual context of the forming of Marr’s theory during the first two decades of the twentieth century (including cases of physical anthropology, archaeology, and nonclassical linguistics), the article claims that Nikolai Marr’s scholarly pursuits were but a specific case of rethinking and constructing the language of hybridity. Modern social sciences in Russia have produced a distinct metalanguage to describe and analyze the complex diversity of imperial situation. “Hybridity” was the central trope of this metalanguage, or rather its equivalents at the time – “mixing” (smeshenie) and “crossing” (skreshchenie) – insofar as “hybridity” had not yet entered the Russian vocabulary. It is in this sense that “hybridity” is discussed in this article: as a language of self-description in the imperial situation (category of practice) and as an element of the analytical language of the project of modern imperial social sciences, rather than a direct importation of the concept of hybridity from contemporary postcolonial scholarship (as used by Homi Bhabha and others). The emergence of scholarly models that explicitly used the trope of hybridity and perceived hybridity as a foundation of the norm (rather than a marginal condition of deviation from pure forms) is characterized here as the late imperial epistemological revolution. This epistemological revolution became possible and had potential in the context of the imperial situation and in the ideologically pluralistic regime of the late empire. It was already exhausted by the late 1920s, having received support from neither the hegemonic Soviet discourse nor from the subaltern Eurasianist or Soviet national and anticolonial projects. Methodological constructivism and hybridity as a whole became obsolete as survivals of the unstable and limited pluralism of the New Economic Policy era. Their final marginalization in the USSR was just a question of time, given the consolidation of the Stalinist regime throughout the 1930s and the stake on the Russian nation as the official Staatsvolk. The upheaval of World War II delayed the official correction of the metalanguage of social hybridity based on the controversial Marrist linguistic theory of “crossing,” until Stalin’s “linguistic turn” of 1950 formally established the foundations of the literally “counterrevolutionary” episteme of “simple things” and the project of the ideological state based on that episteme.

Book review

This article contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms and functions of imaginary world-building in contemporary popular culture, introducing the perspective of active transformative reception, which is the perspective of fan fiction writers and readers. The author argues that contemporary fan fiction as a postmodern literary field and ‘fictional anthropology’ is much broader in its transformative capabilities than it is believed even in fan studies, in particular in relation to world-building. She takes as an example Russian Harry Potter fan fiction and pays special attention to the production and reception of such fan fiction genre as crossover. Analysis of texts of this genre and a survey conducted in the Russian Harry Potter online community let her come to the conclusion that this transformative activity of contemporary fandoms in virtual worlds blurs all the lines between different types of sub-creators and undermines the traditional preconceptions of how imaginary worlds can be built, inhabited and developed.

This article focuses on fan fiction as a literary experience and especially on fan fiction readers’ receptive strategies. Methodologically, its approach is at the intersection of literary theory, theory of popular culture, and qualitative research into practices of communication within online communities. It characterizes fan fiction as a type of contemporary reading and writing. Taking as an example the Russian Harry Potter fan fiction community, the article poses a set of questions about the meanings and contexts of immersive reading and affective reading. The emotional reading of fan fiction communities is put into historical and theoretical context, with reference to researchers who analysed and criticized the dichotomy of rational and affective reading, or ‘enchantment’, in literary culture as one of the symptoms of modernity. The metaphor of ‘emotional landscapes of reading’ is used to theorize the reading strategies of fan fiction readers, and discussed through parallels with phenomenological theories of landscape. Among the ‘assemblage points of reading’ of fan fiction, specific elements are described, such as ‘selective reading’, ‘kink reading’, ‘first encounter with fan fiction texts’ and ‘unpredictability’.

Everett C. Hughes (1897–1983) was one of the first exchange professors, teaching sociology in Frankfurt. During his stay in the spring of 1948 he wrote field notes and after his return to Chicago he submitted a book proposal to the University of Chicago Press. Its director rejected the proposed book and Hughes stopped working on it. This paper describes what Hughes wanted to write and discusses then the only published article on the topic, Hughes’ “Good People and Dirty Work”, which appeared in 1962. © 2015, Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden.

Created by a group Leningrad and Moskow dissident the samizdat historical publication collection Pamiat' ("Memory") is one of the best-knowln editions in the history of Soviet dissident movement. The main of the feature of this collection is that unlike the informational, publicistic or literary dissident editions of the time, it was a distinctively academic, historic publcation. The first volume of the Pamiat' collection was put  together in 1976. The initiator of the project is Arseny Roginsky, who was joinad by Larisa Bogoraz, Alexsandr Daniel, Sergey Deduln, Alexsandr Dobkin, Felix Perchonok, Dmitry Zubarev, Alexey Korotaev to work of the project. According to the initiator of the publication, its goal was to confront "the lies of official historiography" and to try and make the first steps towards recreating a "true history" of Soviet society.   

Russian Populists of the 1870s generation who remained in the country after 1917 struggled to find a place in the new society but also to defend their legacy as genuine revolutionaries who had pursued a different path from that of the Bolsheviks. Working collaboratively with others of his generation, many of whom were now members of the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Exiles (OPK), Nikolai Charushin wrote his memoirs (O dalekom proshlom, 3 vols, 1926–31) in close collaboration with several other surviving figures in that generation and under duress, to ‘get history right’ and provide an authentic rendition of their life experiences. The authors deploy the tools of memory and generational studies to show how a joint process of memoir writing evolved into one of collective auto/biography. This close study and comparison of the text of Charushin’s memoirs with those of others of his generation, of their unpublished correspondence — including previously overlooked letters of Vera Figner — and of the activities of the OPK sheds light on the ‘memory wars’ of the early Soviet era.

This article presents the reconstruction of W. Ockham’s approach to the analysis of truth conditions of tensed propositions in order to clarify Ockham’s view and to present it in a systematic way. The article focuses on the chapter seven of the second book and chapter seventy two of the first book of the treatise Summa Logicae. One of the points that makes the analysis of Ockham‘s theory of tensed and modal propositions significant is the fact that he rejected the standard scholastic tool of the analysis of modal and tensed propositions — ampliation (ampliatio). Therefore, Ockham had to create his own theory that was based on his general ideas of supposition and predication that were primarily described by him in terms of the present tense. The main aim of this article is to examine why Ockham doesn’t use traditional tool for analysis of the truth-conditions in propositions about Future and Past. In the beginning of the article there is a textual reconstruction of the chapter seven, then there is an examination of the role of subject term and predication rules in this kind of propositions. Subsequently there is a general chart of the analysis of truth conditions in tensed propositions in Ockham’s view. In the article author claims that the ground of the rejection were Ockham’s ontological interests which were presented in his debate with W. Burley. Instead of traditional disjunction Ockham suggests detachment of the two senses of proposition. This idea leads to semantic controversy. Reference to the objects in past and future cannot be reduced to the reference to objects in present. Nominalism and mental language theory leads him to these semantic decisions 

This essay deal with history of postwar patterns of distribution and consumption in the USSR in two contexts: as a direct result of the war; and as part of the development of the Stalinist mobilization model in general.

The Soviet Gulag: Evidence, Interpretation, and Comparison

Taken together, these articles suggest how the study of "ordinary" people sheds light on the pinnacles of power, as well as vice-versa; that the material and ideolodical dimensions of the war cand and must be studied together; and that both chrolological and geographical synthesis and boundary-crossing can be productively applied to many other areas in the scholarships on the Eastern Front in World War  II.

 

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, photography became re-popularized as an amateur hobby, which had been unavailable to Soviet citizens since the early 1920s and the liquidation of original amateur societies. Khrushchev’s attention to consumer goods meant that cameras and equipment were affordable for the first time in decades. In lieu of formal educational structures for both professional photojournalists and amateur photographers, Sovetskoe foto and the photo section of the Union of Journalists took action. Almost every issue of Sovetskoe foto contained approximately twenty to twenty five pages devoted to amateur photography. Articles addressed the technical skills required for amateur photography, and offered lessons in photographic aesthetics, written by the most prominent photojournalists, photography critics and theorists in the Soviet Union. In Moscow, Leningrad, and many other cities, amateurs founded photography clubs, which offered lectures and workshops for amateur photographers. These clubs hosted their own exhibitions, and participated in national and international exhibitions both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Amateurs also submitted their work to Sovetskoe foto, where photography masters critiqued their work. By the late 1960s, however, some amateurs found the photography club environment stifling and elitist. As a result, amateurs increasingly found themselves caught between creativity and conformity in order to maintain club membership and exhibition opportunities. Ultimately, while some chose to attempt to reform this trend from within clubs, others turned to unofficial and non-conformist art photography as a creative outlet.

Combining the talents and expert knowledge of an early modern historian of Russia and of a Soviet specialist, Russia's Empires is the first major study of the entire sweep of Russian history from its earliest formations to the rule of Vladimir Putin. Looking through the lens of empire, which the authors conceptualize as a state based on institutionalized differentiation, inequitable hierarchy, and bonds of reciprocity between ruler and ruled, Kivelson and Suny displace the centrality of nation and nationalism in the Russian and Soviet story. Yet their work demonstrates how imperial polities were key to the creation of national identifications and processes that both hindered and fostered what would become nations and nation-states. Using the concept of empire, they look at the ways that ordinary people imagined their position within a non-democratic polity - whether the Muscovite tsardom or the Soviet Union - and what concessions the rulers had to make, or appear to make, in order to establish their authority and preserve their rule. 

While other works in the existing historical literature have applied the concept of empire to the study of Russian history, the story told here is in several ways unique. First, the book tackles the long stretch of the history of the region, from the murkiest beginnings to its most recent yesterday, and follows the vicissitudes of empire, the absence, the coalescence, the setbacks of imperial aspirations, across the centuries. The authors do not impose the category, but find it a productive lens for tracking developments over time. Second, the framework of empire allows them to address pressing questions of how various forms of non-democratic governance managed to succeed and survive, or, alternatively, what caused them to collapse and disappear. Studying Russia's long history in an imperial guise encourages the reader to attend to forms of inclusion, displays of reciprocity, and manifestations of ideology that might otherwise go unnoted, overlooked under the bleak record of coercion and oppression that so often characterizes ideas about Russia.

Russia's Empires follows imperial patterns of rule through distinction, inclusion through reciprocity, and structures for legitimacy in order to trace the experiences of empire by both rulers and ruled. The book traces the coalescence and development of imperial relationships across more than a thousand years. This book brings histories of the peripheries and of the growth and rule of empire into central narratives based in Moscow and Leningrad or Petersburg, in order to understand all the pieces as part of an interrelated whole. The book brings together stories of despots and dictators at the center with those of people of all classes, conditions, and nationalities who jointly made the Russian Empire.

Central Russia’s Riazan province was on the front lines of World War II for two weeks in late 1941. Placed between German and Soviet forces, the province was on the edges of authorities unable to exert full control over the region. In that time, Soviet power dissolved in the countryside. Peasants raided warehouses and dismantled collective farms while enterprising local notables aided the embryonic occupation regime. Documents created during the two weeks and their immediate aftermath show that rural Russians, even collaborators, defied simple classification as anti-Soviet. Instead, they exhibited survivalist instincts and a traditional antipathy toward central authority rather than a preference for either German or Soviet power. As Soviet power returned to Riazan, authorities grappled with the mass upheaval that the power vacuum had enabled. Unlike later interpretations, which would stress the role of German atrocities in occupation regimes, Riazan authorities blamed “anti-Soviet elements” among the province’s population.

The Second World War held and retains a unique place in Soviet and post-Soviet historical memory. Scholars have generally studied the legacy of the war from the perspective of political and cultural elites. This article uses Russian digital commemoration to assess contemporary memory of World War II from a social perspective. A macroanalysis of I Remember, an interview and social networking site, and Pomnite Nas!, a site with user-contributed listings of war monuments, shows how popular memory of the war reiterates and updates Soviet historical narratives. Supported but not initiated by Vladimir Putin’s government, these sites show how state and society are interacting in Russia to produce and reproduce memory of the war. The article contributes both to methodological discussion of the internet as a source for memory studies and the fate of the Second World War in Russia.

Debate on the exhibit Great Patriotic War and Holocaust at the Moscow Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

This is the feature review article, focused on the new books on representation of the Holocaust (the Shoa), published in Israel, France, and the USA in 2013-2014. It is supposed that the new academic paradigm is emerging now, caused by inclusion of the Eastern European literature (fiction, poetry, essays) on Holocaust into the context of Western Holocaust literature. The methods of research and interpretation of post-traumatic literary works are also discussed; one of the most difficult issues here is contextualization of such works within diverse cultural and literary movements of a period.  

The emancipation of the nobility in 1762 was, arguably, the central event in the social and cultural history of the Russian imperial elite and, indeed, a watershed in the relationship between the elite and the state in Russia, marking official recognition by the monarchy of the nobles’ autonomous subjecthood. The road toward this recognition, it is argued here, was paved with a thorough reconceptualization of human nature in Russian governance practices in the first half of the eighteenth century, and reconstructing the trajectory of this reconceptualization is the goal in this chapter. Indeed, attempts to understand human nature were central for political thinking of the age, from Locke, Puffendorf, and Montesquieu to Smith and the Founding Fathers of the United States. Scholars of government and practicing politicians in the West debated the limitations and opportunities inherent in human nature for organizing better governance of their societies. So, I argue, did their counterparts in Russia. Whereas in Petrine administrative thinking and legislation nobles appear as subjects swayed by their pernicious passions and thus requiring to be restrained, in subsequent decades the members of the elite were increasingly viewed in a more positive light: as entitled, by their praiseworthy ambitions and love of honor, to make decisions regarding their own lives and the public good in general.

This essay deal with history of postwar patterns of distribution and consumption in the USSR in two contexts: as a direct result of the war; and as part of the development of the Stalinist mobilization model in general.

The article deals with a unique personal project by Hamburg graffiti writer Oz (Walter Fischer, 1950-2014), one of the oldest and prolific participants of Hamburg graffiti and street art scene. His personal project, successful in terms of public recognition (and public hate), includes 30 years of painting simple but incalculable symbols on nearly every surface in Hamburg. Oz presents a viewer with a different image of the city, creating an open and fluid urban “community of vision” as well as the conditions for street art to develop itself in the city in a very innovative way. “Oz project”, while being controversial in the official opinion, contributed to Hamburg identity, first, and to the understanding of one particular important function street art performs on city streets, second. Street art works as an “exerciser for vision”, as a developer of different cultural ways of seeing. Methodologically the article brings together visual studies, which are comparatively less presented in the existing field of debates on street art, with social anthropology and urban studies.

In this chapter we are going to examine the logical connections between various descriptions of the Scientific Revolution proposed by Alexandre Koyré. We are going to propose an attentive and detailed reading of texts written by Koyré in different periods of his life in order to identify various aspects of his interpretation of the revolution in thought that occurred in early modern Europe. His most famous description of the Scientific Revolution (the dual characterization) indicates two aspects of the process that led to the emergence of classical physics: “destruction of the Cosmos” and “geometrization of space”. However, Koyré frequently used other expressions for characterization of the period, such as “mathematization of Nature”, or transition “from the world of more-or-less to the universe of precision” and “from the closed world to the open universe”. We could expect that Koyré would try to reduce his initial dual characterization to one single formula. I argue here that, on the contrary, the duality of description had a special meaning which permits us to keep in focus the complexity of the intellectual change that occurred during 17th century, when new science was rising from a new conception of reality, and a new world-view was emerging from the new science

 

Adyghe, a polysynthetic language of the West Caucasian family, shows the typological characteristics of ergativity, left-branching word order, and the flexibility of the lexical categories. Its word has a high degree of morphological complexity and consists of five ordered morphological zones, within which the order of affixes can vary, and recursion is possible. The information encoded in the predicate includes the argument structure, causation, and various aspectual and modal characteristics. Many meanings can be expressed, either with a combination of morphemes, or a combination of words, or with both simultaneously. There are structural asymmetries at the clause level and the principle C violations in cross-clausal syntax—the phenomenon that has been recorded also in many polysynthetic languages of America.

Les hommes transposent facilement leurs actes et leur comportement sur les animaux, comme on le voit dans les fables, d’Ésope à La Fontaine. A l’inverse, on peut se demander si nous transférons les caractéristiques des animaux sur nous-mêmes, et de quelle façon. Ce double phénomène d’anthropocentrisme et de zootropisme linguistique se rencontre fréquemment dans les langues. En partant du constat que certains verbes liés aux animaux s’emploient aussi pour désigner ou pour caractériser des actes ou des comportements humains, des linguistes français et russes ont mené une recherche sur les verba sonandi et la métaphorisation des cris et des bruits émis par les animaux dans 23 langues appartenant à 7 familles linguistiques différentes, dans le cadre d’une exploration linguistique relevant d’un domaine à part entière, la typologie lexicale. Le volume est divisé en deux parties. La première traite des verbes de bruit associés aux animaux selon une approche linguistique. La seconde regroupe des études culturelles qui se complètent, portant sur l’emploi des verbes de bruit et sur la représentation des animaux dans la littérature et dans certaines cultures. L’ouvrage peut intéresser aussi bien des spécialistes – linguistes, traducteurs, culturologues, spécialistes des sciences humaines en général – que tous ceux qui s’intéressent aux cultures et aux langues.

Die russischen Emigranten, die nach dem Sieg der bolschewistischen Revolution ihr Land verließen, wurden zu Zeugen und Opfern des ersten geschichtlichen Experiments, eine totalitäre Utopie in die Wirklichkeit umzusetzen. Viele von ihnen begriffen, dass die im Oktober 1917 begonnenen Prozesse lediglich den ersten Akt eines allgemeineuropäischen Zivilisationsbruchs darstellten. Wie gebannt schauten damals viele Europäer auf das von den Bolschewiki durchgeführte soziale Experiment, ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass unzählige Menschen für dieses Experiment mit ihrem Leben bezahlen mussten. Wie wurde dieses "Experiment" von den führenden russischen Exildenkern analysiert? Wie reagierten sie auf die immer tiefer werdende europäische Krise der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts? Mit diesen Fragen befasst sich das vorliegende Buch. 

The book tells about the final years of the russian poet Osip Mandelstam, his persecution, exile and the death (1932-1938)

Between the summer of 1937 and November 1938, the Stalinist regime arrested over 1.5 million people for "counterrevolutionary" and "anti-Soviet" activity and either summarily executed or exiled them to the Gulag. While we now know a great deal about the experience of victims of the Great Terror, we know almost nothing about the lower- and middle-level Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD), or secret police, cadres who carried out Stalin's murderous policies. Unlike the postwar, public trials of Nazi war criminals, NKVD operatives were tried secretly. And what exactly happened in those courtrooms was unknown until now. In what has been dubbed "the purge of the purgers," almost one thousand NKVD officers were prosecuted by Soviet military courts. Scapegoated for violating Soviet law, they were charged with multiple counts of fabrication of evidence, falsification of interrogation protocols, use of torture to secure "confessions," and murder during pre-trial detention of "suspects" - and many were sentenced to execution themselves. The documentation generated by these trials, including verbatim interrogation records and written confessions signed by perpetrators; testimony by victims, witnesses, and experts; and transcripts of court sessions, provides a glimpse behind the curtains of the terror. It depicts how the terror was implemented, what happened, and who was responsible, demonstrating that orders from above worked in conjunction with a series of situational factors to shape the contours of state violence. Based on chilling and revelatory new archival documents from the Ukrainian secret police archives, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial illuminates the darkest recesses of Soviet repression -- the interrogation room, the prison cell, and the place of execution -- and sheds new light on those who carried out the Great Terror.

A collection of essays on female rulers from different countries and historical epocks. 

This edited collection presents a range of methods that can be used to analyse linguistic data quantitatively. A series of case studies of Russian data spanning different aspects of modern linguistics serve as the basis for a discussion of methodological and theoretical issues in linguistic data analysis. The book presents current trends in quantitative linguistics, evaluates methods and presents the advantages and disadvantages of each. The chapters contain introductions to the methods and relevant references for further reading.

The Russian language, despite being one of the most studied in the world, until recently has been little explored quantitatively. After a burst of research activity in the years 1960-1980, quantitative studies of Russian vanished. They are now reappearing in an entirely different context. Today we have large and deeply annotated corpora available for extended quantitative research, such as the Russian National Corpus, ruWac, RuTenTen, to name just a few (websites for these and other resources will be found in a special section in the References). The present volume is intended to fill the lacuna between the available data and the methods that can be applied to studying them.

Our goal is to present current trends in researching Russian quantitative linguistics, to evaluate the research methods vis-à-vis Russian data, and to show both the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods. We especially encouraged our authors to focus on evaluating statistical methods and new models of analysis. New findings concern applicability, evaluation, and the challenges that arise from using quantitative approaches to Russian data.

This collective monograph is a study of one of the most important problems in today’s world: state and nation building in multi-ethnic and multi-national societies. It presents a comparative analysis of the experience of state and nation building in Russia and South Africa, two countries, which recently and practically simultaneously went through a period of abrupt social, political and economic transition. In both this transition resulted in an upsurge of ethno-national and racial tensions. Such an analysis is of great interest to all those who study similar problems both at an academic and practical levels.

 

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

This volume arises from the international conference 'Hymns of the First Christian Millennium — Doctrinal, Devotional, and Musical Patterns' held in June 2014 at the Institute of Classical Studies in conjunction with King's College London. The original scope of the conference has been re-scaled to focus particularly on late antique Christian devotion as it manifests itself in hymns; experts on a variety of topics of early Christian hymnody have been invited to boost both specificity and depth of discussion in the proposed volume. The resulting collection of papers covers a range of aspects of literary, social, doctrinal, musicological, and devotional patterns of Christian hymnic texts, their liturgical and pious use in the period of late antiquity.

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in Northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support. Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the North as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Evgenii Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

The twentieth century began with a deep identity crisis of European parliamentarianism, pluralism, rationalism, individualism, and liberalism―and a following political revolt against the West’s emerging open societies and their ideological foundation. In its radicalism, this upheaval against Western values had far-reaching consequences across the world, the repercussions of which can still be felt today. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against those ideas and approaches usually associated with the West.  Leonid Luks’s essays deal with the various causes and results of these Russian and German anti-Western revolts for twentieth-century Europe. The book also touches upon the development of the peculiar post-Soviet Russian regime that, after the collapse of the USSR, emerged on the ruins of the Bolshevik state that had been established in 1917. What were the determinants of the erosion of the “second” Russian democracy that was briefly established, after the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991, until the rise of Vladimir Putin? Further foci of this wide-ranging study include the specific geopolitical trap in which Poland—constrained by its two powerful neighbors—was caught for centuries. Finally, Luks explores the special relationship that all three countries of Central and Eastern Europe’s "fateful triangle" had with Judaism and the Jews.

The western opening of Russia under Peter I and Catherine II, the formation of modern state in the German territorial states and their further development in the era of enlightened absolutism, Russia’s rise to great power and the emergence of the European “pentarchy”, diverse dynastic connections and cultural influences, the revolutionization of Europe by Napoleon and the defense of Napoleonic imperialism – it is a multifarious history in which German-Russian relations and contexts are integrated in the “long 18th century”. This volume illustrates these connections in 35 joint contributions by German and Russian historians. Short factual representations, supplemented by documents and images, shed light on the development of German-Russian interactions. The volume continues the three-part work “Germany-Russia: Stations of Common History, Places of Commemoration”, of which the volume on the 20th century was published earlier, and the next one – on the 19th century – will follow soon.

What was the role of the Italian Armed Forces in their past missions abroad? What role do they play today? Which is the legal framework that authorized the employment of the Italian army and regulates the conduct of Italian soldiers? This book tries to answer these questions, illustrating to a wider audience the role that our Armed Forces perform during their involvement in peacekeeping and peace-building missions. A role aimed at maintaining peace, stabilizing conflictual areas,  and restoring hope in territories often overturned by civil wars and inter-ethnic conflicts.