The revival of Russian Orthodoxy at the turn of the century coincided with a wave of anti- Semitism, and many Russian intellectuals of the time, following Vladimir Solov'ev, understood the defense of the Jews as their Christian duty. For Solov'ev, however, interest in the Jews went beyond ethical considerations and ran deeper through his philosophy than even his Utopian vision of a theocracy based on Hebrew Scriptures. Indeed, the expression of what may be Solov'ev's central concept–the Divine Sophia–achieved clarity through his selective reading of the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The argument that follows does not seek to prove influence, for Solov'ev approached the study of Kabbalah with well-formed philosophical convictions. Rather, Solov'ev's fascination with Jewish mysticism arises from affinity and recognition, as the Russian theologian sought a vocabulary with which to explain his own mystical intuitions.

One of the most important events of the summer of 1917 was the opening of the All–Russian Council of the Orthodox church on 15 August in Moscow. In a dramatic opening ceremony, solemn processions from all the churches of Moscow converged on Red Square for the service led by Metropolitan Tikhon. The council had been convened by a 5 July order of the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, V. N. L'vov, with the concurrence of the Provisional Government. The calling of a church council–the first since Peter's establishment of the collegial system of administration–was a substantive change in church governance and also had a symbolic meaning. In pre-Petrine Russia, the councils not merely had played an ecclesiastical role but had formed an integral part of national government. (For example, Ivan IV and the church council had worked together to implement changes in the secular code of law as well as in spiritual and ecclesiastical matters.)

On the morning of 11 May 1876, a young seamstress pushed her stepdaughter out the window of their Petersburg apartment. The apparent reason for this attempted infanticide (miraculously, the child survived her four-story plunge) was Ekaterina Kornilova's anger at her husband and jealousy of his deceased first wife. The case would seem undistinguished in its sordidness were it not for Fedor Dostoevskii's adoption of the affair as a cause celebre. Although he originally attacked Kornilova's defenders, Dostoevskii later defended her as well when he learned that Kornilova had been pregnant at the time of the attempted murder.

From 1918 to 1939, a diplomatic partnership between the Holy See and Poland appeared extremely likely. Since 1870 the Vatican had sought to restore the temporal status it had lost during Italian unification. The Lateran accords of 1929 resolved the Roman question and confirmed the disputed sovereignty of the papal enclave. This achievement, however, was only part of the Apostolic See's determined efforts to fortify its international standing in a continent dominated by Protestant, anticlerical, or atheist states. The Vatican seemed to be a natural match for revived Poland, a nation renowned for its fealty to Rome and menaced by Germany and Russia, traditional antagonists of the papacy and champions of totalitarian doctrines that the church regarded as inimical.

Two hundred years ago, the Polish government was preparing another biennial meeting of the sejm, their parliament, by organizing a confederation to raise troops to fight with Russia against the Turks. In a startling switch of political alignments, the opposition to King Stanistaw August Poniatowski seized control of the parliament, threw off the Russian alliance, and undertook a major governmental reform that culminated, after the reconciliation of the king with progressive members of the opposition, in the enactment of the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The major import of Polish reform was to increase the size of the ludicrously small Polish army and to regain full independence from supervision by the partition powers, particularly Russia.

The experience of Ukrainian Jewry from 1917 to 1920 is a paradox in modern Jewish history. At the same moment that the leaders of the Ukrainian revolutionary movement extended unprecedented civil rights to Ukrainian Jews, pogromists operating in the name of that same movement brutally terrorized hundreds of Jewish communities with violence and robbery. This strange incongruity has not been satisfactorily addressed; studies of the period have either concentrated on the pogroms or focused on Jewish socialists in Ukrainian politics. Linguistic barriers and subsequent developments, notably the 1926 assassination of Symon Petliura, have further polarized an already dichotomous history. This article attempts to synthesize these two trends.

Russian lubki, or popular prints, of the eighteenth century reveal clearly an archaic premodern humor. Since 1945 much seventeenth century and early eighteenth century urban popular literature, which before existed only in manuscript books, collections of stories, and plays, has been published and has revealed a native tradition of popular humor in Russian print.' The appearance in popular prints of various characters and activities from the popular festive culture, scenes from popular theatricals, parodies of sundry rites and proceedings, and so forth attest to the fact that this culture of popular humor was thriving in the early eighteenth century.

Dumy, the oral epic songs of Ukraine, like other heroic poetries, have a military subject matter. One duma cycle tells of battles with the Turks and Tatars in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; another sings of the Khmel'nyts'kyi uprising against the Poles that began in 1648. In addition to the expected narratives about armed conflict, the duma tradition also contains a group of songs, usually called the cycle about everyday life, that deals with topics only tenuously connected to war. These songs tell of such problems as filial ingratitude and sibling disloyalty. The popularity of this "unheroic" body of dumy relative to the other cycles suggests a powerful nonmilitary influence on the Ukrainian epic tradition at some point in its development. Other content features, some unusual elements in duma form, and many unique characteristics of duma performers likewise indicate such influence.

Horace's dictum, Utpictura poesis, might appear anachronistic today in light of modern literary theory, which has tended to view literature as a distinctly verbal form of art and has preferred lately (especially during the current craze for Mikhail Bakhtin) to examine such decidedly nongraphic aspects of prose fiction as narratology, dialogicality, and polyphony.

"Ivanov," a drama with a tendency, devoid of the "immediate and carefree objectivity" of the earlier works of Anton Chekhov, has seemed to at least one critic a turning point in the author's production. VI. Korolenko has suggested that "this first drama … might provide valuable material for the thoughtful biographer who will trace the history of a crisis of the soul, which had led Chekhov away from Novoe Vremia to Russkie Zapiski. Zhizri and Russkaia My si'."

Utopia and dystopia designate the human dream of happiness and the human nightmare of despair when these are assigned a place (topos) in space or time. Since narrative literature "is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery," Utopian and dystopian inventions are mere extremes of literature's ongoing story. In realistic fictions, although social circumstances may range from the incidental to the decisive, the story of the movement to happiness or unhappiness is usually told in terms of individual achievement and failure. In the Utopian and anti-utopian scheme deliverance or damnation depend on the place where one has found oneself, whether it is "the good place" or "the bad place." Although Utopias are allegorical constructs of the rational mind, attempting to bring order to the disorder of life, their denial of what is for the sake of what ought to be makes them a species of fantasy literature–a dream of reason.

Glasnost has made available to scholars many of the postwar files of the Soviet Council for Religious Affairs. These files, covering the activities between World War II and 1966 of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs and the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, have been deposited in the Central Governmental Archives in Moscow. Five thin volumes of indexes refer to thousands of pages of material, including signed original documents, initialed carbons, and reports from individual inspectors and district commissioners. The materials appear to be genuine, even though they are not complete.

Poslanie mnogoslovnoe, an example of Muscovite antiheretical polemics, can be analyzed to add to our substantive knowledge of pre-Petrine Russian history and perhaps to refine our methodological tools for a critical evaluation of the sources for this period. Poslanie has long been regarded as a principal source of information about the life and ideas of its presumed author, the midsixteenth century Novgorodian monk Zinovii Otenskii, whose accomplishments as a theologian and publicist of the medieval Russian Orthodox church have traditionally been ranked only behind those of Iosif Volotskii and Maksim Grek. In conjunction with Zinovii's Istiny pokazanie, Poslanie provides our only detailed exposition of the teachings of the runaway slave Feodosii Kosoi, whose alleged criticisms of state and church constitute the most extreme rejection of the established order articulated in medieval Muscovy. In addition to its value for the interpretive study of Russian religious and intellectual history, Poslanie presents us with a methodological problem typical of early Russian documents: The work is anonymous and undated, and basic questions about its authorship, time of composition, and provenance have not been satisfactorily answered. The lack of information on either Zinovii or Kosoi and the contradictions in the pictures of both Zinovii and his heretical opponents presented in Poslanie, Istiny, and other, less detailed works, attributed to the monk, make solving these problems all the more interesting

Conversations with recent immigrants from the Soviet Union' often revolve around the theme of druzhba. In Israel and America alike, Russian-Jewish newcomers wistfully and passionately describe their old circles of friends as involved in absorbing conversations about literature, cinema, and news from abroad. As they reminisce, Soviet Jewish immigrants break into smiles and relate the political jokes and critical anecdotes they heard and told in these circles. They tell too of friends pooling scarce resources to help each other purchase a car, an apartment or summer home, a once-in-a-lifetime find on the black market, or, simply, food. Happily they remember birthday and New Year's parties that just seemed to have happened; they describe festive singing and dancing in joyful gatherings that were never formal or prearranged.

Stalin's death and Nikita Krushchev's unsuccessful attempt at de-Stalinization significantly eroded official Marxist-Leninist ideology in the Soviet Union. Searching for a new alternative to the fading Communist ideology, many Russians turned toward traditional Russian forms of national and religious identity.