Boris El'tsin's abrupt departure from the presidency on New Year's Eve 1999 began a new phase in Russia's postcommunist political development. With the presidency no longer occupied by the author of the constitution, the question arises whether his successor will consider himself more bound by the constitutional arrangements in place since 1993, or less. Rather than to speculate on Vladimir Putin's political personality, this paper will instead examine the record of president-parliament relations since 1993 for indications concerning whether Russia's institutions have begun to settle into those of a consolidated constitutional democracy.

Most studies of the lyric sequence (or “cycle,” as it is most commonly referred to in the Russian critical tradition) situate its origins in the Romantic period, and its period of greatest flowering in the Silver Age. More and more frequently, however, scholars have come to question this assumption, suggesting that the phenomenon has its roots in the eighteenth century, perhaps even earlier. This claim would appear, at first glance, to be suspect. The aesthetics of neoclassicism did not encourage— indeed, to the best of our knowledge, did not even recognize—the production of lyric sequences. Russian poets of the eighteenth century have nothing to say about them, nor are they acknowledged as such by readers or critics.

In both Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry and her life, sexuality plays an intensely ambiguous role; she vacillates between the belief that the body is merely a “wall” hiding the soul, and the contradictory belief that sexual intimacy is the necessary vehicle to spiritual transcendence. Tsvetaeva's personal sexual adventurousness is by now a well-known fact of her biography; yet this fact is not simply a result of the poet's rebellious nature but is, rather, evidence of a profound philosophical inquiry into the very nature of sex and sexuality that she sustained throughout the course of her life and her writing. Sex is the idiom in which she writes transcendence of her own limiting subjectivity, via an exit into the radical alterity represented by the figure of the beloved.

A key moment in the evolution of modern European states was the halfcentury or so that straddles the year 1800. Confronted by commercial and colonial expansion across the seas and the steppes, as well as by the fiscal consequences of two long world wars (1756-63 and 1792-1815), monarchy and ministers increasingly viewed the state as a great engine for mobilizing “economic” resources. This period marks the culmination of what Paul Kennedy calls the European “financial revolution,” which was generated primarily by war. “If the difference between the financial burdens of the age of Philip II and that of Napoleon was one of degree, it still was remarkable enough,” Kennedy observes. The stresses of generating income in such quantities changed individual states as well as the international economy.

Decades ago, a highly readable émigré memoir aptly labeled Stalinist cultural policy the “taming of the arts.” Reinforcing the dominant totalitarian paradigm according to which Soviet society was the passive object of an all-powerful state, this catchy image became popular in the Cold War west. During the 1970s, the “revisionist” generation of western scholars began questioning the orthodox view of Stalinist culture. For example, Vera Dunham suggested that the middle-class values apparent in the literature of mature Stalinism might reflect a “Big Deal” between the bureaucracy and the cultural tastes of the new Soviet “middle class,” while Sheila Fitzpatrick maintained that even in the heyday of Stalinism, some prominent intellectuals held positions of “cultural authority,” enabling them to influence the course of cultural life.

The status of the Serbian standard language in the years since the breakup of Yugoslavia has been controversial. Serbian linguists were ill prepared for the demise of the unified Serbo-Croatian language in 1991 and found themselves scrambling to create a new linguistic order. While die Croatian linguists in socialist Yugoslavia had long advocated a separate literary language called Croatian, rather than Croato-Serbian, the Serbs had continued to insist on the joint language and readily accepted the term Serbo-Croatian. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Serbs finally had to recognize that given Croatian and Bosnian-Muslim linguistic separatism, a joint literary language was no longer possible. In this paper, I examine the consequences of the breakup of Serbo-Croatian for Serbs in the Yugoslav successor states, especially in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). I discuss the emergence of three ideologically opposed factions of Serbian linguists. The debate among Serbian linguists has been heated and acrimonious, reflecting broader political struggles within the FRY. I suggest that politically motivated turmoil in Serbian linguistic circles has put the New Serbian on a chaotic, unstable, and unpredictable path into the future.