Russian psychologist A. R. Luria presents a compelling portrait of a man’s heroic struggle to regain his mental faculties. A soldier named Zasetsky, wounded in the head at the battle of Smolensk in 1943, suddenly found himself in a frightening world: he could recall his childhood but not his recent past; half his field of vision had been destroyed; he had great difficulty speaking, reading, and writing.

Much of the book consists of excerpts from Zasetsky’s own diaries. Laboriously, he records his memories in order to reestablish his past and to affirm his existence as an intelligent being. Luria’s comments and interpolations provide a valuable distillation of the theory and techniques that guided all of his research. His “digressions” are excellent brief introductions to the topic of brain structure and its relation to higher mental functions.

“Not a mirror but a magnifying glass”—such, in the poet Mayakovsky’s words, was the theater of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The first to insist on the primacy of the director’s role, indeed the first to conceive of it as a role, this passionately dedicated Russian director tore down the fourth wall and forced the actors and audience together into one inescapable community of experience.

Yet Meyerhold recorded few of his theories in writing, and the intensity and brilliance of his work must be recaptured through the actors and artists who helped create the performances. Focusing on Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary career, Paul Schmidt has assembled in this book journals, letters, reminiscences, and, of special interest, actual rehearsal notes that build a fascinating, intimate picture of Meyerhold as a theorist and as a man.

Included are Meyerhold’s frantic notes to his teacher, friend, and bête noire Stanislavsky; detailed descriptions of how he trained his actors in “biomechanics”; and memories by such students as Eisenstein and such friends as Pasternak and Ehrenburg. One chapter deals with Meyerhold’s never-realized conception of Boris Godunov, while another describes his direction of Camille, which starred Zinaida Raikh, his wife, and which played its 725th and last performance on the day Stalin’s government liquidated Meyerhold’s theater. Paul Schmidt’s introduction and headnotes enhance our understanding of Meyerhold as a pioneer of modern theater.

The geochemical processes that take place in water bodies do not stem entirely from the activity of bacteria, but are also determined by the biological activity of higher plants and animals. The Microflora of Lakes and Its Geochemical Activity, the first English translation of the work of S. I. Kuznetsov, renowned Soviet microbiologist, is a detailed description of these processes.

The Microflora of Lakes opens with a complete outline of the ecology and physical and chemical properties of water bodies and a discussion of the entire complex of hydrobionts, since these factors exert tremendous influence on the microbial population. The work then focuses on the principles of the morphology and physiology of the living cell, background knowledge essential to the understanding of the role of microorganisms in the chemical cycle. Having laid the groundwork for the discussion, Kuznetsov follows with chapters on the distribution of bacteria and transformations of organic matter in lakes. He then examines the role of bacteria in the oxygen regime, and the cycles of organic matter, nitrogen, sulfur, iron, manganese and phosphorus. The last chapter describes the role of microorganisms in sediments of calcium carbonate waters.

The Microflora of Lakes and Its Geochemical Activity provides a wealth of information on the microbial limnology of fresh-water lakes throughout the world, particularly in the Soviet Union. As a summary of the geochemical activities as related to the geographic, geological, and physical relationships of fresh-water lakes, it is a monumental study.

The Microflora of Lakes was translated for the National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C., by the Israel Program for Scientific Translations in Jerusalem.

In such diverse fields as semiotics, literary theory, social theory, linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, Mikhail Bakhtin’s importance is increasingly recognized. His posthumous fame comes in striking contrast to his obscurity during his lifetime (1895–1975), much of it spent as a semi-invalid in a succession of provincial towns. He received no public recognition, in the Soviet Union or abroad, until the last dozen years of his long life—not surprisingly, given the historical circumstances. His books on Freudianism (1927), on Formalism (1928), and on Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929) were published as the work of others, as were a number of important essays. His study of Dostoevsky appeared under his own name but only after his arrest and sentence to exile, and it quickly disappeared from sight. Some manuscripts were never published; one was used by Bakhtin for cigarette paper. His book on Rabelais, completed in 1940, remained unpublished for twenty-five years—until, in a less repressive political climate, friends had succeeded in negotiating a reissue of the book on Dostoevsky.

The Rabelais book, when translated, caused a stir among folklorists, anthropologists, and social historians, with its theory of carnival and of ritual inversions of hierarchy. The book on Dostoevsky aroused intense interest among literary theorists in the concept of the “polyphonic novel” and the many authorial voices to be heard therein. Similarly, as Bakhtin’s other writings have appeared in translation, he has been hailed in disparate circles for his contributions to linguistic, psychoanalytic, and social theory. But among all those who have studied various aspects of Bakhtin’s work, few have been in a position, or even attempted, to assess his total achievement.

It is the great merit of Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist’s book that they have endeavored, insofar as possible, to give us the complete life and the complete works of this complex and multifaceted figure. The authors have had unique access to the Bakhtin archive in Moscow, have traced further material in other cities in Europe, and have interviewed many persons who knew Bakhtin. The phases of his life are placed in their physical and intellectual milieux, and accounts are given of the figures who made up the various “Bakhtin circles” over the years. All of the works, published and unpublished, are discussed, in the context of European philosophical movements and the currents of thought of the time. Underlying and informing Bakhtin’s particular theories in various fields was, in the authors’ view, his lifelong meditation on the relation between self and other. The philosophy he evolved has come to be called dialogism, since it conceives of the world in terms of communication and exchange. It is a world view with wide-ranging implications for the human sciences.

During the 1920s the Soviet Union made a determined effort to stimulate revolution in China, sending several scores of military and political advisers there, as well as arms and money to influence political developments. This was revolutionary Russia’s first large-scale intervention in the affairs of a foreign country and, although it ended in failure, the story of these missionaries of revolution—sojourners in a bewildering environment, ultimately disillusioned—constitutes an engrossing chapter, authoritatively told, on this little-known enterprise.

The usual secrecy surrounding Soviet foreign intervention was broken when the Chinese government seized a mass of documents in a raid on the Soviet military headquarters in Peking in 1927, thus revealing the details of Russia’s first extensive effort to promote revolution abroad. Missionaries of Revolution weaves together information gleaned from the secret documents—instructions, reports, minutes, letters, resolutions—with contemporary historical materials.

The author reveals the human side—the dangers, frustrations, illnesses, and bafflements faced by the Russian men and women working for Lenin and Stalin in China, based upon diaries, letters, and reminiscences of participants. Those who study and know the period will find a wealth of illuminating detail based on the meticulous use of Chinese and Russian sources and decades of careful historical research. Those who do not will be introduced to an exciting aspect of Chinese, Soviet, and revolutionary history.

The period before 1917 was a brilliant one for Russian literature, marked by the innovations and experimentation of modernism. With the Bolshevik seizure of power, a parallel process of drastic social innovation and experimentation began. How did revolution in the arts and revolution in society and politics relate to one another? Victor Erlich, an eminent authority on modern Slavic culture, takes up this question in Modernism and Revolution, a masterful appraisal of Russian literature during its most turbulent years.

Probing the salient literary responses to the upheaval that changed the face of Russia, Erlich offers a new perspective on this period of artistic and political ferment. He begins by revisiting the highlights of early twentieth-century Russian poetry—including the works of such masters as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak—and goes on to examine the major prose writers of the first post-revolutionary decade. In an inquiry that ranges over poetry, criticism, and artistic prose, Erlich explores the work of, among others, Symbolists Bely, Blok, and Ivanov, Futurists Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, Formalists Jakobson and Shklovsky, the novelists Pilnyak and Zamyatin, the short-story master Babel, and the humorist Zoshchenko. He delineates a complex and ambiguous relationship between Russian literary modernism and the emerging Soviet state.

Here, following the artistic experimentation and cultural diversity begun early in the century, we witness a trend toward regimentation and conformity as the literary avant garde's modus vivendi with the new regime becomes increasingly precarious. As this regime recedes into history, along with the passions and prejudices it aroused, the accomplishments and failures of writers caught up in its early revolutionary fervor can at last be seen for what they were. From a perspective formed over a lifetime of study of Russian literature, Victor Erlich helps us look clearly, judiciously, and deeply into this long obscured part of the literary past.

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War II, America's experts on Russia watched as Russia and the Soviet Union embarked on a course of rapid industrialization. Captivated by the idea of modernization, diplomats, journalists, and scholars across the political spectrum rationalized the enormous human cost of this path to progress. In a fascinating examination of this crucial era, David Engerman underscores the key role economic development played in America's understanding of Russia and explores its profound effects on U.S. policy.

American intellectuals from George Kennan to Samuel Harper to Calvin Hoover understood Russian events in terms of national character. Many of them used stereotypes of Russian passivity, backwardness, and fatalism to explain the need for--and the costs of--Soviet economic development. These costs included devastating famines that left millions starving while the government still exported grain.

This book is a stellar example of the new international history that seamlessly blends cultural and intellectual currents with policymaking and foreign relations. It offers valuable insights into the role of cultural differences and the shaping of economic policy for developing nations even today.

Joseph Stalin had been dead for three years when his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, stunned a closed gathering of Communist officials with a litany of his predecessor’s abuses. Meant to clear the way for reform from above, Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” of February 25, 1956, shattered the myth of Stalin’s infallibility. In a bid to rejuvenate the Party, Khrushchev had his report read out loud to members across the Soviet Union that spring. However, its message sparked popular demands for more information and greater freedom to debate.

Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring brings this first brief season of thaw into fresh focus. Drawing on newly declassified Russian archives, Kathleen Smith offers a month-by-month reconstruction of events as the official process of de-Stalinization unfolded and political and cultural experimentation flourished. Smith looks at writers, students, scientists, former gulag prisoners, and free-thinkers who took Khrushchev’s promise of liberalization seriously, testing the limits of a more open Soviet system.

But when anti-Stalin sentiment morphed into calls for democratic reform and eventually erupted in dissent within the Soviet bloc—notably in the Hungarian uprising—the Party balked and attacked critics. Yet Khrushchev had irreversibly opened his compatriots’ eyes to the flaws of monopolistic rule. Citizens took the Secret Speech as inspiration and permission to opine on how to restore justice and build a better society, and the new crackdown only reinforced their discontent. The events of 1956 set in motion a cycle of reform and retrenchment that would recur until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

In the early sixteenth century, the monk Filofei proclaimed Moscow the “Third Rome.” By the 1930s, intellectuals and artists all over the world thought of Moscow as a mecca of secular enlightenment. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome, Katerina Clark shows how Soviet officials and intellectuals, in seeking to capture the imagination of leftist and anti-fascist intellectuals throughout the world, sought to establish their capital as the cosmopolitan center of a post-Christian confederation and to rebuild it to become a beacon for the rest of the world.

Clark provides an interpretative cultural history of the city during the crucial 1930s, the decade of the Great Purge. She draws on the work of intellectuals such as Sergei Eisenstein, Sergei Tretiakov, Mikhail Koltsov, and Ilya Ehrenburg to shed light on the singular Zeitgeist of that most Stalinist of periods. In her account, the decade emerges as an important moment in the prehistory of key concepts in literary and cultural studies today—transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and world literature. By bringing to light neglected antecedents, she provides a new polemical and political context for understanding canonical works of writers such as Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs, and Bakhtin.

Moscow, the Fourth Rome breaches the intellectual iron curtain that has circumscribed cultural histories of Stalinist Russia, by broadening the framework to include considerable interaction with Western intellectuals and trends. Its integration of the understudied international dimension into the interpretation of Soviet culture remedies misunderstandings of the world-historical significance of Moscow under Stalin.

Much of the story about the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany has yet to be told. In Motherland in Danger, Karel Berkhoff addresses one of the most neglected questions facing historians of the Second World War: how did the Soviet leadership sell the campaign against the Germans to the people on the home front?

For Stalin, the obstacles were manifold. Repelling the German invasion would require a mobilization so large that it would test the limits of the Soviet state. Could the USSR marshal the manpower necessary to face the threat? How could the authorities overcome inadequate infrastructure and supplies? Might Stalin’s regime fail to survive a sustained conflict with the Germans?

Motherland in Danger takes us inside the Stalinist state to witness, from up close, its propaganda machine. Using sources in many languages, including memoirs and documents of the Soviet censor, Berkhoff explores how the Soviet media reflected—and distorted—every aspect of the war, from the successes and blunders on the front lines to the institution of forced labor on farm fields and factory floors. He also details the media’s handling of Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust, as well as its stinting treatment of the Allies, particularly the United States, the UK, and Poland. Berkhoff demonstrates not only that propaganda was critical to the Soviet war effort but also that it has colored perceptions of the war to the present day, both inside and outside of Russia.