Among the topics in Slavic literary scholarship that have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, the study of Russian modernism, also known as the Silver Age, has been one of the indisputable leaders. The groundwork for the canonization of the Silver Age was laid in the postwar Soviet Union, where young poets like Andrei Voznesenskii and Joseph Brodsky made pilgrimages to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. The allure of the Silver Age was increasingly felt in official Soviet culture as well. Just as Vladimir Maiakovskii's canonical status had earlier sanctioned the limited study of other futurists, the official recognition of Aleksandr Blok and Valerii Briusov as the bards of the October revolution provided the cover for scholars in the 1970s and 1980s to undertake a massive excavation of symbolist culture. After the beginning of perestroika, survivors from the Silver Age, from philosopher Aleksei Losev to émigré poet Irina Odoevtseva, came to be revered as emissaries from a lost, better world.

The category of tendentiousness—with its dogmatic, didactic, and aesthetically conservative inclinations—seems inherently opposed to the logic of modernism, which emphasized the aesthetic moment of formal innovation. While many modernists argued for the compatibility between aesthetic and political revolution, they invariably met the skepticism of those demanding a clear, ůnambiguously expressed political message from art. But was this conceptual divide unbridgeable? In this article, Peter Zusi explores this question through the case of the Czech theorist of the interwar avant-garde, Karel Teige. Teige exemplifies how the early Czech avant-garde adopted such terms as function and popular character (lidovost) from nineteenth-century Czech discourse, where they had served to celebrate the tendentious applicability of cultural artifacts to a political movement of emancipation. For Teige, however, these terms quickly shifted from accentuating to critiquing political tendentiousness. Teige's shift, Zusi argues, does not represent the trace of cultural belatedness or conceptual confusion as much as it reveals the flexibility of conceptual oppositions too often conceived as static.

During the Napoleonic wars the future existence of Habsburg Galicia was regarded as uncertain, and in the period following the Congress of Vienna the identity of the province was likewise unclear. The eighteenth-century creation of Galicia gave way to the nineteenth-century attempt to create Galicians and to discover a non-national provincial meaning of “Galicia,“ capable of reconciling and transcending national, religious, and linguistic differences. In this article Larry Wolff juxtaposes the political perspective of Metternich and the literary perspective of dramatist Aleksander Fredro in order to analyze the imperial and provincial dynamics of the idea of Galicia, with fürther attention to the public sphere of newspapers and journals, and the cultural perspectives of Galicians like Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (the son of the great composer) and Józef Maksymilian Ossoliński (founder of the Ossolineum library in Lviv). This article traces the evolving cultural meanings of Galicia up until 1835, the year of the death of Habsburg Emperor Franz and the year that Fredro was denounced by a Polish critic as a “non-national” writer. Especially in Fredro's celebrated comedies, it is possible to discern the submerged ideological tensions of empire and province that shaped Galician identity in the early nineteenth century.

The comic figure of the yokel has undergone a resurgence in the past decade, culminating in Sacha Baron-Cohen's Borat. The yokel, whose predictable humor is based on his aggressive backwardness and persistent malapropisms, draws attention to the “foreignness” with which multiculturalism is uncomfortable, while also highlighting the economic and cultural dislocation of globalization. Cohen builds on the longstanding stereotypes about Jews and Gypsies (Roma), creating a persona who resembles the “vermin” of Nazi propaganda and manages to elicit racist responses from his unwitting audience. Borat functions within a fictional framework of racism and ethnic hostility, bringing to light barely concealed discomforts about border-crossings, cosmopolitanism, and global cultures.

In the modern era, the institution of literature is being reconceived across Europe as a national institution. But the new paradigm of national literatures requires a remaking of literary discourse, including the transformation of critical terminology, and this results in literary discourse becoming politicized. By analyzing the history of the term libozvučnost (melodiousness) in the Czech national literary revival, David L. Cooper demonstrates how this seemingly innocent literary term became a political lightening rod for friends pursuing the same national program. This strongly suggests that, in the formative era of national literatures, using literary issues to discuss politics is not simply a matter of instrumentalizing literary criticism for covert political activity but that discussing literary values is directly political. The example of libozvučnost also reveals how the “borrowed“ discourses of Romanticism and nationalism were fundamentally remade to respond to the modern Czech situation.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) elicits extreme and contradictory audience responses. Some filmgoers find it amusing and clever, while others consider it repulsive, even obscene. Analyzing the film's hero as a traditional and archetypical trickster figure, a master of contradictions, a violator of boundaries, can help explain audience reaction. But while traditional folklore tricksters act in a fantasy world, Sacha Baron Cohen entered the lives of real people in trickster (dis) guise. For theater audiences removed from the interactions that created Borat, this film might serve the function of traditional trickster narratives, even as those appearing in the film feel exploited. By using real people and real situations, Baron Cohen has also precluded a follow-up or sequel: folkloric tricksters adapt with time, but a person immediately recognizable as a Hollywood figure cannot reassume trickster (dis)guise.

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

The trial of Rudolf Slánský and his thirteen codefendants in Prague in November 1952 represented the culmination of Stalinist political terror in postwar central and eastern Europe. Ever since, it has attracted much scholarly attention focusing largely on the origins, processes, and outcomes of the trial. In this article, Kevin McDermott examines a crucial, but almost totally unresearched aspect of the affair: Czech popular reactions to Slánský's arrest and trial. Using documents from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and secret police reports from the Ministry of Interior archives, McDermott demonstrates that popular opinion was extremely diverse, ranging from strident and selective support of the official version of the court proceedings; to passive compliance and resigned accommodation; to apathy, guarded dissent, and overt opposition. Two findings are particularly noteworthy: first, virulent antisemitic sentiment was endemic; and second, many workers, rankand- file party members, and even lower-level functionaries were highly critical of the country's communist leaders. In conclusion, McDermott proposes that the archival record reveals the relatively broad diffusion of antisemitism in Czech society, the limits of the “Stalinization” process in the Czechoslovak party, and the failure of Stalinist terror to intimidate the population into submission and eradicate independent thinking.

Georgian and Russian modernisms engaged in a conversation that was by no means one-way and in which the chronological development and aesthetic premises of Russian symbolism became curiously inverted. Piecing together this forgotten dialogue allows us to recover a neglected crosscultural and properly Eurasian dimension of the Silver Age. Russians and Georgians alike invoked the mask as a theatrical form and myth as a narrative structure to articulate problems of individual, collective, and national identity. Mask and myth shared two distinct and somewhat incompatible genealogies, the one deriving from the Italian commedia dell'arte and the other from Friedrich Nietzsche's reading of Greek tragedy, both of which corresponded in turn to a typically Russian tension between the “decadent” and “mythopoetic” redactions of symbolism. These genealogies were critically adapted by the Georgians in an attempt to address the perceived needs of Georgian national culture. Aesthetic and philosophical problems concerning the semiotics of the name, the nature of the poetic persona, and the structure of myth came to be related to wider questions proper to an era of crisis and transition: modernity and historical belatedness, the dynamics of cultural importation, the gendered nature of nationhood, and the vexed relationship between popular culture and modernism as an elite cultural formation.

During the Crimean War, Crimean Tatars were charged en masse with collaborating with the Allies. At the war's conclusion, nearly 200,000 Tatars left the peninsula to relocate in the Ottoman empire. Mara Kozelsky contributes to an understanding of this critical episode in the Crimean War by examining secret surveillance documents, a collection that records complex state attitudes toward Tatars from the Allied landing on the Crimean coast to the Treaty of Paris. These documents reveal that intelligence operations provided no evidence of a collective Tatar guilt and instead testified to the diversity of pressures on state policies toward subject populations on the front lines of battie. Shifting wartime conditions, religious tensions, and repeated crises at the front highlighted unresolved debates about religion and loyalty to the state. Some officials recommended deporting the Tatars, others encouraged their migration, and still others advocated on the Tatars’ behalf.

In this article, Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat appears as just the latest in a decades- long exchange between American and Soviet models of minority uplift: on the one side, civil rights and multiculturalism; on the other, druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples) and mnogonatsional'nost’ (multi-national- ness). Steven S. Lee argues diat, with Borat, multiculturalism seems to have emerged as the victor in this exchange, but that the film also hearkens to a not-too-distant Soviet alternative. Part 1 shows how Borat gels with recent leftist critiques of multiculturalism, spearheaded by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj żižek. Part 2 relates Borat to a largely submerged history of American minorities drawing hope from mnogonatsional'nost', as celebrated in Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. The final part presents Borat as choosing neither multiculturalism nor mnogonatsional'nost', but rather the continued opposition of the two, if not a “third way.” For a glimpse of what this might look like, the paper concludes with a discussion of Absurdistan (2006) by Soviet Jewish American novelist Gary Shteyngart.

In this essay, Susanna Soojung Lim examines the philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev's representation of China and Japan in his theory of Pan- Mongolism. Emerging at the disjuncture between Solov'ev's ecumenism and the geopolitical realities of contemporary history, Pan-Mongolism was a creation onto which the philosopher projected his anxiety and disillusionment at the failure of his vision. Lim begins by surveying Russian perceptions of East Asia before the 1850s and situating Solov'ev within the popular discourse of the “yellow peril.” Discussing how Solov'ev recapitulates previous notions of this east, she considers Pan-Mongolism in terms of an acute Russian response to the historical and cultural changes originating in China and Japan at a period when the modernization of these nations was challenging the existing relationship between, and indeed the very categories of, east and west. A hybrid construct shaped by Russian occidentalism as well as orientalism, Pan-Mongolism is an idea that reveals both the strength and weakness of Solov'ev's Utopian universalism.