The adoption of "socialist realism" by the first All Union Congress of Soviet Writers (17 August-1 September 1934) was a seminal event in Russian cultural history on a par with Peter's embassy to the west or Catherine's Instruction to her legislative commission. Henceforth literature and the arts lost some of their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in the official culture of the Soviet era and in the overbearing discourse of leading newspapers such as Pravda. Writers and artists had to accept the metamorphosis of public discourse itself, as editors and journalists plunged into a kind of hyperreality in the face of the disjunction between the promises and results of Stalinist policies.

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

“Lyric dialogism” is a contradiction in terms, at least in Bakhtin's terms. His most influential essay, “Slovo v romane” (“Discourse in the Novel,” 1934-1935), forcefully characterizes poetry as inherently “monologic,” as excluding or suppressing that wealth of social languages from which the novel shapes itself. Bakhtin's attack on poetry is generally perceived as a tactical exaggeration that serves his argument about the novel. He himself suggested as much when, in another context, he mentioned the "prosification" of the lyric in the twentieth century. On these grounds, many critics, most notably those of the Lotman school, have imported Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to the study of poetry.

“Devil” is a key piece in Tsvetaeva's “anti-Eden” cycle of autobiographical prose, a phrase I have coined to describe her rewriting of both the creation myth of Genesis and its Russian incarnation in the Arcadian boyhoods of Tolstoi and Aksakov. In the series of memoirs which she wrote in the 1930s, she reworked the male myth to reflect twentieth century female experience and, most importantly, to inscribe her selfdefinition as poet.

Russians have long been preoccupied with surnames, particularly a distinction between so-called "good" and "bad" surnames, in ways that may be hard to understand by a nation of immigrants whose ancestral names were often mutilated by immigration authorities or anglicized by their bearers with a stroke of the pen. In the Russian Empire, such changes required the personal permission of the ruler and were exceedingly rare until the end of the nineteenth century.

In memory of loan Aluaş

In February 1991 the Romanian Parliament passed a law for the restoration of land to its former owners. Known as Law 18/1991, the Law on Agricultural Land Resources (Legea Fondului Funciar) liquidated collective farms and returned their lands to the households that had given them over at collectivization (1959-1962).' The former owners recover not merely usufruct, or use rights, but full rights of ownership.