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These are my comments and responses to questions and comments by my colleagues at the Handbook symposium that took place last fall.

Inspired by the perceived affinity between the two seemingly distant cultures, Irish authors have tended to adapt Chekhov (and other Russian classics) to reflect on their own social, cultural, and political environment, often with the aim of shaping the culturalpolitical landscape of their present. Russian authors' works arrived there through Britain as a cultural mediator, in Standard English translation, but from the very beginning Irish theater practitioners have had their own take on the Russian works. Most of the Russian realia, or culture-specific elements, were omitted, the characters' Russian names were altered to sound more familiar, Russian place names were changed-Marushkin, for instance, became the Dublin suburb, Ballsbridge, and the charred swamp \"the bog\"; the term \"peasant\" being a slur in Ireland, was changed to \"tenant,\" and instead of the emancipation of the serfs, the Irish Land Act came in as a point of historical reference (Younger 293-94). (Kilroy, \"Programme notes\" n.p.) Common factors between the Russian and Irish gentry, beyond the political parallels, also readily offer themselves in the form of provincial isolation in a period before modern communications.

Questions traditional explanations for Jewish excellence in science in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Palestine in the twentieth century. Scholars have struggled for decades to explain why Jews have succeeded extravagantly in modern science. A variety of controversial theories—from such intellects as C. P. Snow, Norbert Wiener, and Nathaniel Weyl—have been promoted. Snow hypothesized an evolved genetic predisposition to scientific success. Wiener suggested that the breeding habits of Jews sustained hereditary qualities conducive for learning. Economist and eugenicist Weyl attributed Jewish intellectual eminence to \"seventeen centuries of breeding for scholars.\" Rejecting the idea that Jews have done well in science because of uniquely Jewish traits, Jewish brains, and Jewish habits of mind, historian of science Noah J. Efron approaches the Jewish affinity for science through the geographic and cultural circumstances of Jews who were compelled to settle in new worlds in the early twentieth century. Seeking relief from religious persecution, millions of Jews resettled in the United States, Palestine, and the Soviet Union, with large concentrations of settlers in New York, Tel Aviv, and Moscow. Science played a large role in the lives and livelihoods of these immigrants: it was a universal force that transcended the arbitrary Old World orders that had long ensured the exclusion of all but a few Jews from the seats of power, wealth, and public esteem. Although the three destinations were far apart geographically, the links among the communities were enduring and spirited. This shared experience—of facing the future in new worlds, both physical and conceptual—provided a generation of Jews with opportunities unlike any their parents and grandparents had known. The tumultuous recent century of Jewish history, which saw both a methodical campaign to blot out Europe's Jews and the inexorable absorption of Western Jews into the societies in which they now live, is illuminated by the place of honor science held in Jewish imaginations. Science was central to their dreams of creating new worlds—welcoming worlds—for a persecuted people. This provocative work will appeal to historians of science as well as scholars of religion, Jewish studies, and Zionism.

This book examines the rhetorical force of certain key words in the discourses of Russian state, political thought, and literature. It shows how terms for cultured conduct (kul’turnost’), political affection (love, liubov’, joy-radost’ etc.), personhood (lichnost’), truth (pravda) and geographical integrity (tsel’nost’) assumed almost sacral meaning. It considers how these terms took on a life of their own, imposing the designs of the Russian state and defining the hopes of educated society in the process. By exploring the usage of these words in a wide range of texts, Richard Wortman provides glimpses into the ideas and feelings of leading figures and thinkers in Russian history, from Peter the Great to Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Berdiaev, as well as writers like Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, and Fedor Dostoevsky, giving a sense of the intellectual and emotional universe they inhabited. The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History provides both students and scholars with a specific focus through which to approach Russian culture and history. This book is essential reading for students of Russian government, thought, literature and political action.

The 20th century has been a century of political famines, that is, famines directly—and at times willfully—caused by human policies, in war1 and in peacetime. Scores of millions starved to death in times during which there was enough food to feed everyone and the means to transport it where needed.

\"At last, Russia has begun to speak in a truly original voice.\" So said Anatoly Vaneev, a Soviet dissident who became Karsavin's disciple in the Siberian gulag where the philosopher spent his last two years. The book traces the unusual trajectory of this inspiring voice: Karsavin started his career as Russia's brightest historian of Catholic mysticism; however, his radical methods - which were far ahead of their time - shocked his conservative colleagues. The shock continued when Karsavin turned to philosophy, writing flamboyant and dense essays in a polyphonic style, which both Marxists and religious traditionalists found provocative. There was no let-up after he was expelled by Lenin from Soviet Russia: in exile, he became a leading theorist in the Eurasian political movement, combining Orthodox theology with a left-wing political orientation. Finally, Karsavin found stability when he was invited to teach history in Lithuania: there he spent twenty years reworking his philosophy, before suffering the German and Soviet invasions of his new homeland, and then deportation and death. Clearing away misunderstandings and putting the work and life in context, this book shows how Karsavin made an original contribution to European philosophy, inter-religious dialogue, Orthodox and Catholic theology, and the understanding of history.

In its full-color poster for elections to the All-Russian Jewish Congress in 1917, the Jewish People's Party depicted a variety of Jews in seeking to enlist the support of the broadest possible segment of Russia's Jewish population. It forsook neither traditional religious and economic life like the Jewish socialist parties, nor life in Europe like the Zionists. It embraced Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian as fulfilling different roles in Jewish life. It sought the democratization of Jewish communal self-government and the creation of new Russian Jewish national-cultural and governmental institutions. Most importantly, the self-named \"folkists\" believed that Jewish national aspirations could be fulfilled through Jewish autonomy in Russia and Eastern Europe more broadly. Ideologically and organizationally, this party's leadership would profoundly influence the course of Russian Jewish politics. Jewish Rights, National Rights provides a completely new interpretation of the origins of Jewish nationalism in Russia. It argues that Jewish nationalism, and Jewish politics generally, developed in a changing legal environment where the idea that nations had rights was beginning to take hold, and centered on the demand for Jewish autonomy in Eastern Europe. Drawing on numerous archives and libraries in the United States, Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, Simon Rabinovitch carefully reconstructs the political movement for Jewish autonomy, its personalities, institutions, and cultural projects. He explains how Jewish autonomy was realized following the February Revolution of 1917, and for the first time assesses voting patterns in November 1917 to determine the extent of public support for Jewish nationalism at the height of the Russian revolutionary period.

Beginning in the late 1920s, the central driving force responsible for the preparation of specialists for work in the Northern, Siberian, and Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation has been the Herzen State Pedagogical University of Russia, St. Petersburg (Herzen University), primarily led by the Institute of the Peoples of the North. Here, linguists are trained in twenty-three languages of Northern indigenous minorities. Notably, several languages of these minority groups—such as Nganasan, Dolgan, Itelmen, Enets, Ul’ta—are taught only here. The university also provides training in the field of traditional cultures of indigenous peoples (methods of traditional applied arts and crafts of the peoples of the North; dance and musical folklore; museology, etc.). However, not all experts in Northern studies are aware of the educational programs and scientific schools within the Department of Theory and History of Culture at Herzen University, under which the committee for the defense of doctoral and candidate dissertations has been working jointly with the Institute of the Peoples of the North for thirty years. The chairman of the council, doctor of arts, Professor L. M. Mosolova is the founder of the department and the head of the scientific school for the study of the culture of the regions of Russia, the countries of Northern Europe, and Eurasia. A significant amount of research completed by students—from undergraduate to postgraduate levels—is dedicated to the history and current issues of the various regions of Russia, including Siberia, the Far East, and Northern Europe.

The 20th century in the Baltic region had it all. The turbulent century did not spare the small territory and its population, which was visited by practically every calamity the modern era had to offer. At westward edge of the Russian Empire, the region was subjected to the harsh Russification drive of the late imperial era. With diverse religions and nationalities and its geographic buffer between the Empire and the German Reich, it was also the crucible of key battles during and mass refugee crises following World War I. In the interwar period, the rise of the independent Baltic States precipitated myriad political experiments and population politics together with constant maneuvering to preserve their fragile and ultimately short-lived sovereignty. World War II ushered in a period of unprecedented extremes with waves of brutal occupations, deportations, the Holocaust, the subjection of the territory to the communist experiment, and ultimately, the decimation of state sovereignty for the next four decades. The almost unavoidable outcome of this course of events has been the focus on the region from the point of view of the large powers that sought to dominate and shape it. The rather limited number of foreign scholars who command Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, fortified this orientation in the writing of the history of the region. The present volume seeks to shift the attention to the local point of view through the writing of Baltic scholars. By no means a comprehensive expose, the essays nevertheless explore key junctures in the history of the three Baltic countries as viewed “from within,” both then and now.

[...]the 1911 book by Richard Green Moulton, World Literature and Its Place in General Education, the very first book on the subject in English, argues that world literature looks different according to one's particular native literature perspective. Specifically, in literary studies Western theory, almost invariably filtered through American academe, has set the tune for much, if not most, Chinese literary theory during the last few decades. Here, Wang Ning, Yang Mingming and Yang Xin highlight the importance of Zhou Zuoren's 1918 essay \"Literature of Human Beings\" (Ren de wenxue) as a cornerstone of the ideas propagated by the New Culture Movement and shortly thereafter the May Fourth Movement of 1919, and of the new Chinese literature arising from and through these movements. If there is anything that all articles in this present issue demonstrate it is that Chinese literature is intimately interwoven with other literatures, not only Western but also Japanese, Korean, and Indian, in varying degrees influencing and having been influenced by these literatures, entering into fruitful dialogue with them, and in the process altering the content as well as the course of \"world literature,\" adding-with a term dear to much Chinese discussions of such interwovenness-its own \"Chinese characteristics\" to the common store of the world's literatures.