Among the most prominent generic signals of Dostoevskii’s The Possessed are those suggesting allegory. Allegory is one of several genres in the novel referred to by name. The narrator characterizes Stepan Trofimovich’s romantic poema as “some sort of allegory” (9) and remarks that, after the most intimate of encounters with his patroness, Stepan Trofimovich would sometimes “jump up from the couch and beat the wall with his fists,” all of which “without the slightest allegory“ (12). Concerning the climax of Iuliia Mikhailovna’s soirée, an allegorical representation of the various literary schools and tendencies of the day, the narrator reports, “It would have been difficult to imagine a more pitiful, tactless, talentless, and vapid allegory than that ‘literary quadrille’” (389). On a more fundamental level, the work’s second epigraph, the passage from the Gospel of Luke describing the exorcism of a possessed man and the flight of the demons into a herd of swine, provides an allegorical foundation for the entire action, projecting the work against biblical history.

The Relations between the Allies and the North Russian government were unique in the history of Allied intervention since, unlike other regions, the situation at Archangel presented unusual aspects: in the first place, there were no Russian armed forces, to speak of, on whom the government could rest its authority; in the second place, the actual territory freed from the Bolsheviks was too small to warrant a government as formal as that which had been conceived for the administration of the whole Northern Region down to Petrograd and Vologda; and, finally, the presence at Archangel of the Allied Ambassadors side by side with the British Major-General Frederick C. Poole, Commander of All Armed Forces in North Russia, created a singularly complicated conflict of authority.

Since the ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the withdrawal of Russia from the ranks of the belligerents, the Allies (especially France and Great Britain) had sought to help those elements in Russia that might bring the country once more into the war against Germany. The French Ambassador, Joseph Noulens, favored the socialist groups, particularly the “Union for the Regeneration of Russia, while the British, through their Naval Attache Captain Cromie, and their special agent Lockhart, preferred to deal with the more conservative elements among the officers of the Russian Army and Navy.

The headline in the 15 August 1937 issue of the Great Falls Tribune proclaimed, “Montana Families Have Their Own Colony in Poland.” This colony of eight American families constituted the upper management of the Giesche Mining Company of Katowice, Silesia. Owned by Americans since 1926, the Giesche Company was Poland's largest zinc mining company and one of Poland's largest coal producers. The newspaper article described the beautiful wooded site where the Americans lived, the nearby golf course, the good winter skiing, the numerous Hollywood films available at the local movie house, and the Americans' Polish language lessons.

The physical book of this century has been described as “a degenerate weakling, bent on self destruction.” In this world of “Lweaklings” Soviet publications are especially prone to self destruction, and it is a matter of serious concern to those librarians and scholars who work with the decaying books, periodicals and newspapers which record the facts, figures and ideas of Russian and Soviet civilization.

In 1957 William J. Barrow, a Richmond, Virginia, expert on paper, began a study of the deterioration of American book papers with funds granted by the Council on Library Resources, Inc., of Washington, D. C. He found that “most library books printed in the first half of the twentieth century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” The materials upon which this verdict was based were 500 non-fiction books printed and published in the United States between 1900 and 1949.

Among the problematic works of great writers, Pushkin's Boris Godunov occupies a special place. This strange hybrid of history, drama, narrative poetry, and prose Pushkin called a “romantic tragedy,” and he considered it his masterpiece. Yet the play's publication in 1831 was met with surprise and dismay. By consensus of a baffled public, Boris Godunov was a failure—neither romantic, nor feasible on the tragic stage.

Since that time, generations of critics, playwrights, and producers have tried to come to terms with this troublesome text. Tolstoi's famous comment—that all great nineteenth-century Russian works defy clear generic classification1—has been invoked in defense of many irregular texts, but not this one. Boris remains stubbornly, inexplicably “undramatic.” Criticism has in fact tended to redefine the play rather than to investigate it. Boundaries are routinely blurred between the historical Tsar Boris, the historical period when his tale is retold, and the world of the fictional creation itself.

This article argues that a focus on Ukraine challenges the general understanding of culture in the revolutionary period, which either focuses on artists working in Moscow making Soviet art, or on non-Russian (Ukrainian, Jewish or Polish) artists in the regions making “national” art. Neither paradigm captures the radical shift in infrastructure during the imperial collapse and civil war. Placing the regions at the center of analysis highlights how Kyiv was an important cultural center during the period for later artistic developments in Europe and in the USSR. It shows that revolutionary culture is fundamentally wartime culture. Finally, the article argues that peripheral visions are central to a full geography of culture in order to trace how cultural infrastructures collapse and are re-constituted.

Lenin selected from the "populist heritage" and praised at various times those points which might strengthen his attempt to make a revolution, and condemned whatever parts did not relate well to a particular phase of his program. Wielders of Soviet power since Lenin have continued to demonstrate this artificial ideological flexibility in their efforts to perpetuate the victory of 1917. As political and national requirements have changed, the regime has demanded that interpretations of the revolutionary populist movement complement these developments.