Nabokov’s unfinished novel, Solus Rex, composed in Paris during the winter of 1939-40, was the final flowering of the author’s “last season of Russian prose writing.” The novel was ultimately abandoned following Nabokov’s emigration to America in May 1940. Nabokov apparently intended to resume work on it, for in a letter of April 29, 1941, to his new friend Edmund Wilson, he remarked that he had “left Europe in the middle of avast Russian novel which will soon start to ooze from some part of my body if I go on keeping it inside.”There was no resumption, however.

Nineteenth-century Russian writers often displayed an existential quality that is significant not only because it was apparently indigenous but because it was one of the first features of Russian thought to influence the West. There is no accepted label for this trait—Geoffrey Clive uses the term “intuitive existentialism,” while Marc Raeff speaks simply of a “more or less existentialist” philosophic temperament —but, by any name, its influence on the development of existential thought in the West is undeniable. Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus each acknowledged the importance of Dostoevskii in relation to their own thought, while many religious existentialists, and even the atheistic Heidegger, have found their concerns partly anticipated in a work such as Tolstoi’s Death of Ivan Ilich. Similarly, if less frequently, Vladimir Solov'ev, Konstantin Leont'ev, Lev Shestov, V. V. Rozanov, and especially Nikolai Berdiaev have attracted the attention of specialists on existentialism.

Soviet statements of policy on nationality relations traditionally have expressed a commitment to equalize economic development among the union republics of the USSR. As early as the 1920s, Soviet leaders promised to reduce differences between more advanced and more backward republics. The program adopted in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the intention of “devoting special attention to those areas of the country which are in need of more rapid development.” The goal of economic equalization among union republics is said by Soviet sources to have broad social and political significance, and the elimination of disparities in the economic base is thought to be necessary for the achievement of harmony among Soviet nationalities.

In his short sketch, “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District,” Ivan Turgenev imagined the provincial marshal of the nobility to be “a man of unrestrained and dignified expression entirely in keeping with his starched shirt-front, infinitely broad waistcoat, and round snuffbox full of French tobacco.” For Turgenev and many contemporaries, the marshal's studied pomposity and ostentatious cosmopolitanism signified the overweening social pretension and thin veneer of Westernism which constituted the worst features of the Russian nobility. The marshal of the nobility was a frequent target for social satirists through most of the nineteenth century.

Archbishop Antonii’s Kniga Palomnik (circa 1201-4) is the earliest extant account of a Novgorodian pilgrimage to Constantinople. The work has long been valued by historians as a document of the Byzantine capital's treasures on the eve of the Latin invasion and by philologists as a model for the literary genre known as the khozhdenie. Recent scholarship suggests that Kniga Palomnik’s readership was far wider than previously supposed and that Archbishop Antonii’s literary skills should not be underrated. But when it comes to analyzing the appeal of the work, the critical consensus ends. Some view Kniga Palomnik as an exemplary account with a few insignificant breaches of etiquette. Others contend that the author’s talents are most apparent in rhetorical exhortations, where he lapses from the genre’s decorum. There are grounds for both positions. Kniga Palomnik is indeed typical, in that it consists of a series of descriptive essays framed between exordial and concluding topoi. At the same time, Antonii’s fondness for rhetoric undeniably signals a break with tradition. My own findings indicate a third alternative, namely, that the rhetorical “lapses” and the “normative” passages conform to a system of etiquette compatible with but distinct from that of the account of the journey per se.

Despite their often disparate recollections of Ivan Bunin, émigré writers, critics, and memoirists agree that he was vociferously opposed to the fiction of Fedor Dostoevski, especially his major novels. They recall repeatedly that Bunin looked upon Dostoevskii as a “loathsome writer” and that he indicted Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov for what he believed to be their strained atmosphere, brittle construction, unwieldy style, and, most importantly, their monotonous characters, especially conscience-stricken criminals and suffering heroines. The émigré literati further contend that Bunin found particularly abhorrent the Christian mysticism of Dostoevskii’s world view. In Bunin’s opinion, they report, the ontological flights and falls of Raskol'nikov and Alesha Karamazov were but a lame excuse to “have Christ shoved into vulgar novels.” Valentin Kataev recalls that Bunin raged apropos of Raskol'nikov: “Dostoevskii sticks your nose into impossible and inconceivable abominations, into spiritual filth—From here has come everything that has happened to Russia: Decadence, Modernism, Revolution, young people who are infected to the marrow of their bones with Dostoevshchina—[ who are] without direction in their lives, confused, physically and spiritually crippled by war, not knowing what to do with their strengths and talents, at times, their exceptional, even colossal talents.” Significantly, Bunin’s dislike of Dostoevskii continued until his death. A. Bakhrakh reports that on November 7, 1953, the last day of Bunin’s life, the writer promised that “should I live and God give me strength, I will try again to remove Dostoevskii from his pedestal.”