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In 2016, the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS) marked two important milestones. At our annual conference in Calgary, we celebrated both the 70th anniversary since the Association's predecessor, the Canadian branch of the Association of American Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages, was established in Toronto in May 1946, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of this journal, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, in 1956.1 (A couple of years were missed in the first decade, and so this note appears in the last issue of Volume 58, rather than 60...)In honour of these anniversaries, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, with the kind permission of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada, reprints below the address by Professor Watson Kirkconnell to the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists in Ottawa, on 10 June 1957.2 In it, he recounts his own personal encounter with Slavic studies and his involvement in the early development of the field in Canada.Watson Kirkconnell (1895-1977), an influential Canadian scholar, university administrator, and prodigious translator of verse from the 1920s through the 1960s, played a significant role in the development of Slavic and East European studies in Canada and in laying the foundation for Canadian multiculturalism.3 Kirkconnell was trained in classics and economics at Queen's University and then at Oxford. In 1922, he accepted a position in the English Department at Wesley College (now the University of Winnipeg), where he remained for 18 years. Between 1940 and 1948, he served as head of English at McMaster University. In this period, he was deeply involved in politics, both in defence of Canadian Eastern European immigrant communities and in warning against alleged Soviet attempts to infiltrate them. In 1943, he was appointed by the Royal Society of Canada to organize and then chair the Humanities Research Council of Canada, the forerunner of today's Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada (of which CAS has been a member since 1954). An 18-year stint as President of Acadia University capped Kirkconnell's distinguished academic career.4Personal tragedy and life in the ethnically diverse Winnipeg of the 1920s sowed the seeds that would make this Scottish-Canadian Baptist with no formal training in Slavic studies into their champion. Bereaved when his wife died in childbirth in 1925, Kirkconnell drowned his sorrows in poetry, setting for himself the unlikely goal of translating verse from across Europe. Armed with only his enthusiasm and a personal collection of over 80 dictionaries in 60 languages, he translated poems from 50 languages. When his publisher questioned the ability of a single person to accomplish such a task, he sent his efforts to various specialists in Britain and the United States for approval. The volume was finally published as European Elegies in 1928.5 Kirkconnell would go on to translate 20 volumes of verse.6 No wonder a later commentator noted that Kirkconnell had "nullified the curse of Babel"!7As Nandor Dreisziger notes, Kirkconnell's translation activities would open up for him new acquaintances among scholars and writers in Britain, the United States, and in numerous European countries; they would also lead to a lifelong association with various immigrant communities in Canada and to a discovery of those groups' contribution to Canadian literature.8 Indeed, in 1935, he published his first volume of translations of Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Italian, Greek, and Ukrainian poetry written in Canada, Canadian Overtones. From 1937 to 1965, he contributed an annual survey of non-English and non-French books written in Canada to the University of Toronto Quarterly.9 Meanwhile, in his activities as a prominent Canadian Baptist in these same years, he emerged as a "prophet of multiculturalism", dedicated to re-imagining that faith's communities and outlook for an ethnically plural Canada. …

This article examines narratives of occupation in portrayals of the Soviet past in Ukrainian museums. The paper analyzes the juridical, historical, and ideological usage of the term “Soviet occupat...

This paper looks at how the memory and, subsequently, narratives of the Waffen SS “Galicia,” later known as 1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, are being (re)constructed and presented to a wider audience by scholars, politicians, and World War II veterans. The narratives and political framings of the “Galicia” Division tend to divide into two dichotomous approaches, each presenting itself as “historical truth.” On the one hand, the ex-members are often portrayed as traitors, opportunists, and war criminals. On the other, ex-“Galicians” are seen as those who arguably chose “the lesser of two evils” and joined the German Army in order to defend their motherland against the Soviet invasion and build a nucleus for the Ukrainian army. Rather than follow the well-trodden paths of attempting to justify or condemn the Division’s actions, this paper will analyze how the interpretations of the Division’s identity are presented in contemporary debates, addressing at the same time the concept of memory. It will offer a discussion of the political framing of history in contemporary Ukraine and of the challenges that Ukrainian historiography faces with regard to the question of World War II in general and the “Galicia” Division in particular. In this way the paper will seek to contribute to an understanding of the institutionalization of memory and the shaping of national identity through existing and newly emerged narratives about World War II in contemporary Ukraine.

In March 2011,1 approached Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue canadienne des slavistes editor Heather J. Coleman with an idea for a special issue on Historical Memory and the Great Patriotic War, to which she responded positively and with enthusiasm. The goal was to produce a volume that would coincide in its appearance with the 70th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (2 February 1943), a conflict that has long been considered a critical turning point in the German-Soviet war, marking the end of the military expansion of Hitler's regime and the concomitant revival of Soviet forces. The year 1943 was also a critical time of nationalist formations in the western borderlands as anti-Soviet forces began to consider the likelihood of the return of the Red Army and Soviet rule. We decided to limit the issue to three of the former Soviet republics that we considered were deeply affected by the war and continuing to deal with it in a variety of ways, namely Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. In the event, no papers were submitted on the war and memory in Belarus, a topic that is coincidentally the subject of my own forthcoming monograph. Thus the papers in this special issue all pertain in their different ways to either Russia or Ukraine and, in fact, are divided equally between these two largest of the East Slavic nations.The reasons for limiting the selection of countries were as follows. In theory it would have been possible to expand the choice of topics to other countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and especially to Poland and the Baltic States, which have had similar encounters with the experiences of the war years, as well as deep differences with Russia concerning the interpretation of some of the events of the war, both in memory and as manifested in archival sources. Fundamentally, the official perception of the end of the war is of a Soviet reoccupation rather than liberation, as evidenced by the name of the Riga Museum of Soviet Occupation. But my feeling was that the topics have been relatively well covered earlier. Scholars such as Jan Gross and Timothy Snyder, for example, have enhanced our knowledge of the war years in Poland in recent works, while broaching the most controversial issues, including that of the Jewish Holocaust.1 It was felt moreover that opening the issue to Poland would render it too large to manage within the context of a single volume and would have been more appropriate were there to be a series of volumes. One understands nevertheless that the omission may be somewhat grating, especially given the interrelated and closely linked memories of events among Ukrainians and Poles in particular, but also between Russia and Poland concerning issues such as Katyn, the Warsaw Uprising, and others.2Arguably, the Baltic States, occupied from 1940 by the USSR, and from the summer of 1941 by the Germans, might also have been added. But in that case my feeling was that other Soviet republics should then have been included as well. Many contributed to the war effort, even those that were never occupied. Some provided troops and supplies; others suffered deportation en masse for alleged collaboration with or support for the enemy (Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingushetians, and Meshketian Turks among them). Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, on the other hand, have seen a revival of debates about the war years and how they should be commemorated. The passage of time signifies that the veterans who remain will soon pass away, so that direct eyewitness accounts of the war will no longer be possible and commemorative events on various anniversaries will have to take place without the traditional veterans' parades. In this regard, the 65th anniversary of the end of the war in May 2010 may be the last major occasion on which the veterans themselves take part in official ceremonies marking the Victory (the word was always capitalized in Soviet accounts from the 1970s onward). Today these post-Soviet states are dealing with highly contentious issues of how to remember the war for a number of reasons. …

The paper considers the case of vegetovascular dystonia, one of the most typical and common “Soviet” diseases. This syndrome emerged in Soviet medicine after World War II, and very quickly become a...

This paper examines the representation of foxes in Russian folk tales (narodnye skazki). It explores the frequency of the word “fox” (lisa) in the titles of folk tales, the number of single...

0. Since the year 1992, the Serbian Institute in Bautzen/ Budysin has published a series of monographs (Schriften/Spisy) with at present close to 40 volumes. These are for the most part original and carefully researched investigations of between 112 and 527 pages in the areas of Serbian history, literature, language, culture, art, society, religion, education, and politics. Also included in this "Series Maior" (our designation-the Latin maior and minor seem more adequate translations than English large, small and major, minor, respectively, of Sorbian wulki and maty) is the Sorbische Bibliographie/Serbska bibliografija, which appears every five years (for an overview of the bibliography up to the year 1995, see our review in CSP 42 [2000]: 385-86); a conference volume; and a selection of reprinted papers.Five years ago, the Institute published the first two volumes in a "Series Minor" (Upper Sorbian Maty rjad; Lower Sorbian Maty red; German Kleine Reihe). Since then five more of these slim volumes have appeared in print.1 Actually, both the title "Series Minor" and the consecutive numbering of the volumes appear for the first time in the fifth volume; this lack of a subtitle and volume numbering will no doubt present some problems for librarians and bibliographers (the Institute's website gives the general title Kleine Reihe des Sorbischen Instituts/Ma!y rjad Serbskeho instituta and also numbers the volumes consecutively; see www.serbskiinstitut.de/si.publm.html).As opposed to the "Series Maior", i.e., the monograph series described above, the "Series Minor" is obviously meant to be published quickly and is addressed to topical issues in contemporary Sorbian life, presents documentation, and, as in Nr. 7, makes available a master's thesis. However, it must be said that this philosophy is never stated overtly by the publisher, i.e., the Sorbian Institute. We must thus await future issues or an explicit editorial philosophy to determine whether our presupposition is correct. Four volumes are devoted to the area of language maintenance, revitalization, and politics (vols. 1, 2, 4, 6); one volume to linguistic analysis (Nr. 7); and one volume each deals with church history (vol. 3) and the reminiscences of a Sorbian Stasi victim (vol. 5), respectively.1. It seems quite appropriate that the "Series Minor" should start out with the publication of workshop papers concerning the major problem facing minority language policy makers in Europe today, viz., that of maintaining and/or further developing such languages (vol. 1). The six sections in this volume deal with Sorbian (both Lower and Upper); Scots Gaelic; Welsh; Saami; Basque; and Romansh. The workshop was held in April, 1999, at the Sorbian Institute in Bautzen/Budysin, a city of some 40,000 inhabitants in Upper Lusatia in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. The city itself cannot boast of more than 8% Upper Sorbian speakers and it is in fact located in what is now generally considered a peripheral area of Upper Sorbian with little hope of language survival beyond the present generation. As Leos Satava points out in his lead paper, it is only in the Western, i.e., the Catholic, part of the Upper Sorbian language area that "the situation is quite favourable so far since 'the baton' is still being passed on in the sphere of ethnic consciousness and intergenerational language transmission" (15).Satava's conclusion is borne out by Ludwig Ela's paper on Sorbian in which the latter states that one cannot really speak of a revitalization policy for this language group (except for the project "Witaj") since the attention of language of policy makers concentrates on "Bestandschutz" and "Bestandspflege" (which basically means "protecting and preserving what there is"). "Witaj" (Lower/Upper Sorbian for "welcome") is a project that foresees the establishment of Sorbian kindergartens and thus eventually of schools and has indeed succeeded in regaining some lost linguistic territory in the Lower Sorbian area (21). …

Despite their Britocentric orientation, translations of Captain William E. Johns’s Biggles stories have been well received outside the United Kingdom. One country where Biggles is quite popular is the Czech Republic. Some passages in Biggles Goes to War, however, set in an invented small Ruritanian-type country located at the eastern edge of Europe, might be seen as causing problems for Czech readers. In her Czech version thereof Alena Petruželkova’s approach is to transpose the action to somewhere in the Middle East, changing many of the names, while leaving the storyline unchanged, even down to details, and adding a degree of vagueness. Transposition to the Middle East also opens the door to a treatment from the point of view of Orientalism. Following Henry Whittlesey’s framework for handling a wide variety of transpositions, this paper will ask whether Petruželkova’s own transposition has succeeded in preserving the original flavour of Biggles Goes to War. The answer is generally positive, with...

This is the fifteenth annual bibliography of works pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to the peoples of those countries settled in Canada, published by Canadian scholars. The primary purpose of the bibliography is to provide an up-to-date research tool for persons working in the area. It is also hoped that it will make known the range of activities and areas of expertise of Canadian scholars. The bibliography notes nearly 400 monographs, articles, review articles, identifiable sections of books, signed encyclopedia entries and published occasional papers, as well as seventeen doctoral dissertations accepted by Canadian universities. Reviews, newspaper articles, mimeographed papers and belles-lettres have been excluded.

The Soviet theater: a documentary history, edited by Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky, New Haven CT and London, Yale University Press, 2014, xxiii + 754 pp., US$125.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-300-19476-0Laurence Senelick and Sergei Ostrovsky have produced an essential, welcome, and muchneeded sourcebook for all scholars - young or grizzled - studying Soviet, especially Russian, theatre. In a task that has taken 20 years, Senelick and Ostrovsky have followed an extensive paper trail. Happily, they have chosen to mimic their subject and, like the Soviet government, interpreted the concept of "document" in the widest possible sense; thus, they include not only official records, decrees, and other pronouncements, but also protocols, minutes of meetings, excerpts from memoirs, diaries, letters, reviews (occasionally foreign, as well as Soviet), and criticism, in addition to the occasionally quoted passages from plays and satires. This widely cast net has brought home great riches culled from the libraries and archives of the Russian Federation, the United States, and Israel. History comes alive with a multiplicity of voices and opinions: enthusiastic, admonitory, anxious, fearful, officious, declamatory, satiric. Together, these documents are witnesses to the constantly shifting, volatile, and often dangerous, commingled terrain of art and politics in the Soviet period.Indeed, the authors forcefully and necessarily emphasize the complete interconnections of art and politics throughout the whole Soviet period, from the heady days of experimentation through repression to the descent into stagnation. This tome thus provides a necessary corrective to the many English-language books and articles that focus on individuals and fail to recognize the inescapable embeddedness of culture in the politics of the period. As the authors insist in their preface:We are not dealing with independent artists creating in a vacuum, nor even with theater folk responding to the tastes of an audience. Art for art's sake plays no role here. In the USSR, almost from the first, the theater is, in one way or another, a reflection of the government's mood. How theater is to serve society is dictated from above: one may oppose that diktat or find idiosyncratic ways to serve it, but it cannot be avoided, (xi)In the introduction, they reiterate the fact that between 1917 and 1992 politics infused all theatres, "traditional or experimental, Party dictated or dissenting, amateur or professional"; yet, astonishingly, many "extraordinary accomplishments saw the light of day" (6).Written with verve and wit, the introduction lays out in a clear, lucid, and concise manner the histoiy of theatre in Russia, beginning with its late arrival in the nineteenth century, its hierarchical structure, and - most significantly - its ardent embrace of moral-ethical imperatives. More than just an entertainment, theatre was to offer moral and spiritual sustenance. This tradition of theatre as a "service" industry was adopted in the Soviet period, when its arsenal was, above all, to be deployed in serving the ends of socialism and communism. Other carryovers from the tsarist period were the systems of control and censorship, honed and perfected into efficiency by the Bolsheviks. Not simply prohibiting what was "harmful", as did their tsarist forebears, the Bolsheviks also went further by prescribing what was "wholesome for the community" (7).The book is logically divided into 11 chapters corresponding to the generally accepted periodization of Soviet history, each prefaced by a succinct and incisive mini introduction: The Revolution, 1917-1919; The Civil War, 1919-1921; The New Economic Policy, 1921-1926; Stalin Consolidates Power, 1926-1927; The First Five-Year Plan, 1928-1932; The Second Five-Year Plan and the Great Terror, 1933-1938; The Great Patriotic War, 1939-1945; The Cold War Begins, 1946-1953; The So-called Thaw and the Refrigeration, 1954-1963; Innovation within Stagnation, 1964-1984; Glasnost' and Perestroika, 1985-1992. …

This paper deals with J.B. Rudnyckyj (1910–1995), a leading Ukrainian emigre scholar of the Cold War period, and his manifold contributions to library science in Canada and the West in general. Although he was a philologist and lexicographer by training and profession, Rudnyckyj took a keen interest in all Ukrainian books and libraries to which he had access during this period. From his very immigration to Canada in 1949, he traveled extensively in this country, in the USA, and in Western Europe. Everywhere he went, he investigated local private Ukrainian, public, and academic libraries, museums, and cultural centres, met with resident scholars, both emigre and Western, and wrote about them in his voluminous publications. These included both travelogues with a strong cultural bent and also more formal library descriptions. For two decades he also compiled extensive yearly bibliographies of Slavic publications in Canada. Rudnyckyj’s motivation, it seems, was a desire to document and preserve the Uk...

Discussing the "contest for the legacy of Kievan Rus"" during the medieval and early modern periods of East Slavic history, Paul Bushkovitch opined that this question was "essentially meaningless." "What does it mean today to claim the heritage of Kievan Rus', a rather backward early medieval society whose primary cultural products emerged from Orthodox Christianity and a monarchical political order?" Many nineteenth-century scholars thought the issue irrelevant. Nevertheless, Bushkovitch concluded, the quest for answers to that question did produce "some useful scholarship."' Bushkovitch's opinion is a decided minority, if not a minority of one.2 The question of the role of Kyivan (Kievan) Rus' in schemas of East Slavic history lies at the base of Oleh S. llnytzkyj's sharp review of a new anthology edited by Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis entitled National Identity in Russian Culture. An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004).3 llnytzkyj's review elicited a reply by Franklin on the listserv of the Early Slavic Studies Association,4 which in turn lead to llnytzkyj's reply, in which he noted that Franklin had declined an invitation to respond on the pages of Canadian Slavonic Papers and extended that invitation to members of the "Slavic interpretative community."5Scholarly disagreement in and of itself need not be depressing; indeed sometimes it is stimulating and productive. But this non-conversation, non-debate is unfortunate and troubling, not so much because it involves professional scholars but because of its tone. Alas, it has long since become apparent that the break-up of the Soviet Union and the re-establishment of an independent Ukraine have not led to an amelioration of the nationalist passion which has long characterized discussions of Ukrainian-Russian relations.Ilnytzkyj's main criticism can be summarized fairly simply. He objects most of all to the conceptual schema of the book, namely its references to a millennium of Russian history and search for national identity, which, seemingly, ignoring the classic objections of Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi, confers the scholarly seal of approval on the Great Russian nationalist usurpation of Kyivan (Kievan) Rus'. Ilnytzkyj finds that the authors of the anthology use the terms Rus' and Russia as synonyms, thereby excluding the Ukrainians and Belarusans from East Slavic history. Ilnytzkyj deems the work not only wrong but also "dangerous" because of the "harm" it would inflict, presumably on unsuspecting students with impressionable minds (p. 128).I do not propose here to deal with theories of nationalism or the thorny issue whether "national identity" of any sort can be projected onto Kyivan (Kievan) Rus' or early modern Muscovy. I have already expressed skepticism that the concept of the "Land of Rus'" (russkaia zemlia), which figures repeatedly in the articles in the anthology, reflected national consciousness through the fifteenth century.6 But as a reformed sinner in translating russkaia zemlia as the "Russian Land," for which I am still atoning,7 I am motivated to try to contribute something useful on the relevant issues of medieval and early modern history. Franklin describes as "misrepresentations" Ilnytzkyj's insistence that the anthology "transposes" Rus' and Russia or makes exclusive claims to Russian succession to Kyivan (Kievan) Rus'. To Franklin, repeating Russian theories of a thousand years of Russian history is not the same thing as endorsing them. There is no guarantee that this "he said/they said" dispute can be resolved; every reader is entitled to interpret the book as he or she sees fit. I hope that by exploring the contents of the anthology on this question at least offers the possibility of shedding some light on the source of the disagreement.In the "Preface" the editors assert that questions about what was Russia, who were the Russians, and what was Russianness have been central for a thousand years, "from the very first native literary and artistic endeavours of the 'Rus" (ancestors of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorusians) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries" (xi). …

(1999). The Podgorica Assembly in 1918: Notes on the Yugoslav Historiography (1919–1970) about the Unification of Montenegro and Serbia. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 157-176.

Andrei Sinyavsky. The Russian Intelligentsia. (The Harriman Lectures). Translated by Lynn Visson. Foreword by Mark von Hagen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xiv, 98 pp. Notes. Index. $19.95, cloth. Masha Gessen. Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. London and New York: Verso, 1997. xii, 211 pp. Selected Bibliography. Index. $18.60, paper. The role of the Russian intelligentsia has been constantly debated during every crisis in Russia's stormy history over the last century. As many as seventy years ago, the philosopher G.P. Fedotov used the word "fateful" to describe the subject because he believed that an understanding of the Russian intelligentsia was key to an understanding of the country and of its future.' Depending on one's point of view, this small fragment of Russia's population has been cast in a kaleidoscope of roles that range from "demon" to "prophet" to "victim." Even among those who believe themselves to be members of the Russian intelligentsia, there are no two individuals who would agree on what the intelligentsia is. The two books under review provide no exception to this rule. Serious, sincere and even passionate, both describe the Russian intelligentsia's current predicament and both offer an excellent opportunity for comparison. The two books present two divergent views of the core of the intelligentsia phenomenon and of its role in the swiftly-changing Russian reality after the disintegration of the Soviet system. The disparities in their views arise not only from the authors' dissimilar ages, experiences and backgrounds, but also from the different perspectives they bring to their work. Sinyavsky searches the past to shed light on the present, while Gessen's standpoint is that of the new generation looking into the future. Sinyavsky's style is accusatory, whereas Gessen uses ridicule to make her case. Sinyavsky's reasoning is generalized and based on published material, while Gessen pieces together encounters and interviews with a variety of her contemporaries. Both authors deem the intelligentsia's role to be crucial to the transition from the Soviet system to freedom and democracy. They also share a propensity to blame the intelligentsia for society's failure to avoid the many political and economic pitfalls along this difficult path. Before going further into a discussion of the contents of each of the books, it is worth paying some attention to their cover designs, which appear to be expressive of the authors' ideas. The cover jacket of Sinyavsky's book features the contours of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, one of the best known masterpieces of Russian architecture and a symbol of unattainable perfection of the distant past. The dominant colour is red, redolent of blood and symbolic of Communist ideas. In the title, also red, the letter R in the word RUSSIAN is reversed so that it turns into X (the pronoun I in Russian) symbolizing the egocentric inclinations of the Russian intelligentsia. The colour of the title of Gessen's book is also red. A kitchen knife pierces a book that has been put on top of a glass jar, typical of the jars one sees in a kitchen. Blood drips into the jar from the cut in the book. The kitchen is the place where, according to the tradition, the intelligentsia "speak speeches," so these objects are closely related to the subject. But the full meaning of the design becomes clear when one manages to decipher the title of the bleeding book, L'homme qui assassina by Claude Farrere. This conveys the scene of the intelligentsia's violent death, whether by murder or suicide. The cover seems to suggest: You realize now that the victim himself was a murderer,2 so read on and there shall be no pity in you. The personality of Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) is inseparable from the history of the Russian intelligentsia. His life and work contributed to the emergence of a very special part of the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union-the dissident, or human rights, movement born as the opposition to his and Yuli Daniel's arrest in 1965 and to their joint trial the next year. …

The proposed transfer of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral museum to the Russian Orthodox Church occasioned a major controversy in 2017. This essay considers the contestation between the museum and the Chu...

This article examines the afterlife of the most prominent Soviet monuments in Kyiv to survive the first wave of demolitions during the early 1990s. It shows how some of them evolved into symbols of...

Serious monuments to the tragic past and whimsical representations of the everyday reflect the structural realities of a new Russian memorial culture. Structural pluralism provides space for expres...

In summer 2021, the Canadian Association of Slavists (CAS) hosts the 10th World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES). Forty-five years ago, our assoc...

This article examines present-day reruns of Romanian socialist-era historical films, their programming, the publicity related to their programming, and their reception. It argues that, unintentiona...

The remarkable output of Bruno Jasienski (1901-1939) bilingual prose writer, poet, dramatist, whose personal life and literary œuvre in both Russian and Polish were formed by divergent, often conflicting social and cultural traditions stands until today unevaluated in terms of the intrinsic continuity of his writing. Jasienski is acknowledged for his substantial contributions both to the Polish Futurist and the Soviet Socialist Realist literatures.1 Yet, because of the seemingly antinomic features of his works, he has generally been viewed by literary scholars in an exclusivist way: either as one of the most individualistic and innovative figures of Polish Futurism during the 1920s, or as an ideologically orthodox proletarian writer ready to serve the cultural policies of his second homeland, the Soviet Union, during the 1930s. Although he was both calumniated and lionized by the public and literary establishments in Poland, France and the Soviet Union, Jasienski remains diminished in his significance due to an incomplete assessment of his poetics. Viewed either as a flamboyant Futurist or a dogmatic Socialist Realist, he is a writer whose work as a whole has not received its due exegesis in tenus of the stylistic and historical avant-garde principles that inform it. The present paper is premised on the belief that Jasienski's writing offers insight into the relationship between the realm of belles lettres and political society, more specifically, the way ideological beliefs about the contemporary human condition aie conveyed through the postulation of fictional worlds by the only art form that is purely propositional imaginative literature. At the heart of the matter is the need to go beyond the outdated positivistic interpretation of Jasieriski that sees him as a writer who eventually "compromised his art in the name of ideology," a categorical view rooted in Platonic idealism which persists in liberal Polish circles today.2 Polish scholars have produced important and absorbing studies of Jasienski's early period but have been intellectually abashed in treating his Soviet period, seeing it as both the personal and literary martyrdom of a writer who succumbed to a well-intentioned but ill-placed ideological loyalty to Marxism a fate common to leading intellectuals between

This is the twelfth annual bibliography of works pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to the peoples of those countries settled in Canada, published by Canadian scholars. The primary purpose of the bibliography is to provide an up-to-date research tool for persons working in the area. It is also hoped that it will make known the range of activities and areas of expertise of Canadian scholars. The bibliography notes more than 450 monographs, articles, review articles, identifiable sections of books, signed encyclopedia entries, and published occasional papers, as well as seventeen doctoral dissertations accepted by Canadian universities. Reviews, newspaper articles, mimeographed papers, and belles-lettres have been excluded. For the purpose of this bibliography, "Soviet and East European" refers to all Slavic areas and the remaining territory of the Soviet Union, Finland, the Baltic States, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and East Germany (after 1945), but not to Turkey, Austria, Greece, China, or international communism outside the bloc. Scholarly material pertaining to Canadian immigrants from the area of coverage is also listed. The bibliography is for 1987 and covers imprints and journal issues bearing that date. Items dated prior to, but actually published in 1987, as well as items omitted from previous editions of this bibliography, have also been included. (For journals, 1987 is the year of publication unless otherwise indicated.) This bibliography has been compiled primarily from submissions of members of the Canadian Association of Slavists. Scanning of current books and periodicals in the humanities and social sciences has provided additional entries. The compiler thanks all those who submitted listings, and Mary Stevens in particular for checking items not held at U.B.C. In a few instances, recent issues could not be consulted because they were late in production. Readers are urged to bring any omissions to the attention of the compiler and to submit lists of their 1988 and 1989 publications to the journal's offices.

This is the fifth annual bibliography of works pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to the peoples of those countries settled in Canada, published by Canadian scholars. The primary purpose of the bibliography is to provide an up-to-date research tool for persons working in the area. It is also hoped that it will make known the range of activities and areas of expertise of Canadian scholars. The bibliography notes over 400 monographs, articles, review articles, identifiable sections of books, signed encyclopedia entries, and published occasional papers, as well as 19 doctoral dissertations accepted by Canadian universities. Reviews, newspaper articles, mimeographed papers, and belles-lettres have been excluded.

This is the seventh annual bibliography of works pertaining to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as to the peoples of those countries settled in Canada, published by Canadian scholars. The primary purpose of the bibliography is to provide an up-to-date research tool for persons working in the area. It is also hoped that it will make known the range of activities and areas of expertise of Canadian scholars. The bibliography notes over 400 monographs, articles, review articles, identifiable sections of books, signed encyclopedia entries, and published occasional papers, as well as 16 doctoral dissertations accepted by Canadian universities. Reviews, newspaper articles, mimeographed papers, and belleslettres have been excluded.

In volume 34, nos. 1-2 (1992) of Canadian Slavonic Papers, Donna Orwin published a comprehensive review of A.B. Wachtel' s The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (1990), asserting that "the style and structure of the book are clear. The author moves skillfully from close textual analysis to textual history, literary biography and on to social history and politics. He has a broad knowledge of European and Russian literary history. He knows the criticism and builds upon it without unnecessary repetitions" (p. 175). In the Slavic and East European Journal (vol. 35, no. 3 [1991]) an equally positive appraisal appeared, the critic (M. Ehre) again expressing an appreciation for the book's solid structure and the refreshing approach to an old subject. Wachtel should indeed be lauded for the courage he displays in tackling material which has been masticated over many times. His main thesis is that the concept of a happy childhood found in Tolstoy's Childhood (1852) inspired a variety of writers among them Aksakov, Belyi, and Bunin to write their own happy accounts about this period of life. In contrast Gorky, who belonged to a different stratum of Russian society, attacked the Tolstoyan view and responded by creating in his Childhood a type of anti-childhood. Wachtel sets himself two goals: to reformulate the formal concept of autobiography and, in the process, to provide fresh insights into the socioeconomic myth of a happy childhood as it was manifested in Russian society proper until 1917, and in Russian emigre literature up to 1930. Wachtel' s proposals are doubtless worthy of scrutiny. My own feeling is that a closer examination of his study must lead to the conclusion that the formal aspect of the works he investigates is misrepresented. For that reason the alleged impact of the famous first lines of the fifteenth chapter of Tolstoy's Childhood on subsequent "Childhoods" is not convincing. In stressing the division between autobiography proper (where author and narrator are one and the same person) and the autobiography (where the two are not identical), Wachtel takes his cue from Philippe Lejeune's definition of the geme: "A retrospective narration in prose by a real person about his or her own life. It emphasizes the individual life and, in particular, the development of one's

(1992). The Shape of Russian Cultural Criticism in the Postcommunist Period. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 353-371.

(1990). The Narrative Structure of Liudmila Petrushevskaia’s Short Stories. Canadian Slavonic Papers: Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 444-456.

The study of the Orthodox diocese 1 in the Russian Empire has a long and storied tradition. Imbued with significant practical advantages (the ability to identify and select a relatively manageable ...

As the First World War shattered the old empires, Orthodox Christians in former imperial territories faced a dilemma. Should they remain loyal to their Russian “Mother Church,” from which they were...

Thirty-four years ago, Robert Conquest published a pathbreaking book titled Harvest of Sorrow (1986), a project of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, which brought world attent...

The main subject of debates among contemporary theologians has been the recent split within world Orthodoxy caused by the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine by the Patriarch ...

In 1775, Catherine II established the diocese of Slaviansk and Kherson in those territories recently acquired from the Ottoman Empire as a result of the Russo-Turkish War. The Empress christened th...

This article examines the peculiarities of the position of the Ural parish clergy. Large parish sizes and the sharp growth of the Orthodox population in the eighteenth century meant that there were...

This article examines the role episcopal visitations played in traversing, constituting, and representing religious space in the newly founded diocese of Omsk in late imperial Russia. As the Russia...

This article considers the foundation of four Orthodox monasteries and convents in Riga diocese in the late nineteenth century and how these conceptually and physically transformed diocesan space t...

The three preceding essays constitute a compelling contemporary journey into Fedor Dostoevskii’s controversial epilogue to Crime and Punishment. Katherine Bowers, Kate Holland, and Eric Naiman sugg...

This article re-examines the structural relationship of the epilogue of Crime and Punishment to the rest of the novel, arguing that the three central events of the plot, the murder, the confession,...

Since 2015, our journal’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, has sponsored the Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor & Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, ...

This article analyzes polyphonic memory in recent works by Serhii Zhadan and Marianna Kiianovs'ka, two leading contemporary Ukrainian writers. Before focusing on Zhadan and Kiianovs'ka, the...

This article examines the Sentimentalist contribution to the pursuit of high culture in Ukrainian literature of the early nineteenth century. It treats this endeavour as a reaction against Ivan Kot...

Throughout the year of 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed; in its wake the Cold War ended and fifteen new countries took their place on the world stage. At the time, no one would have questioned that a revolution of dramatic significance had occurred. Yet, in its May 2011 issue, the international Russian-language magazine Snob asked whether 1991 should be marked as a jubilee or simply noted as a regular anniversary.1 Of the three Slavic countries that emerged from the ruins of the USSR, only Ukraine officially celebrated twenty years of independence. In Russia, the great events of that year have gone largely unmarked - although, as we do the final work of assembling this issue, the largest crowds since 1991 are back in Russia's streets demanding political change, something no one would have foreseen in the summer when the anniversary of the failure of the August 1991 attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev passed without official commemoration. And the anniversary of Belarus's 25 August 1991 declaration of independence is not a national holiday; instead, "Independence Day" is marked on 3 July, the date of the Red Army's liberation of Belarus from Nazi occupation in 1944.If official celebrations have been limited and populations in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine remain ambivalent about the end of the Soviet Union, 1991 stands as a critical year in twentieth-century history and a milestone in the evolution of the field of Slavic studies. Anniversaries provide an opportunity to take stock, as well as to chart new directions for the future. With this in mind, we are pleased to present a special triple issue devoted to exploring the implications of the collapse of the USSR and the evolution of Slavic studies in the two decades since.The research presented here examines not so much the actual events of 1991 - although David Marples, who has written extensively on the late Soviet era, provides us with a helpful reconsideration of the causes of the collapse2 - as their long-term significance in post-Soviet politics, culture, and scholarly life and letters. Five articles, selected from many submitted following a call for papers, present new work that explores the collapse of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet transformations from the perspectives of political science, cultural studies, history, art history, and literary studies. They are followed by a series of commissioned review essays that survey the state of various important subfields of Slavic studies twenty years on. Slavic studies encompass, of course, the history, politics, and culture of the eastern, western, and southern Slavs; nevertheless, I am convinced that these articles centred on the Slavs of the former USSR will provide the opportunity to learn about developments across our disciplines as a whole and offer material for fruitful comparison. It has been suggested that "the collapse" has been fetishized - that scholars have made too much of the transformative effect on their research of the manner in which the USSR dissolved and the new intellectual playing field that dissolution opened up. …

Since 2015, our journal’s publisher, Taylor & Francis, has sponsored the Canadian Association of Slavists’ Taylor & Francis Book Prize. It is awarded annually for the best academic book in Slavic, ...

While reading these three, very different books on the Gulag – a historical monograph, a collection of letters written by a prisoner while in the camps, and a memoir – I was struck that a key contr...