Contenu du sommaire

Michael Confino, Youth revolt and counter culture: The Russian nihilists of the 1860's. Nihilism in the 1860's has been described in Russian historiography either as a phenomenon pertaining to the realm of history of ideas, or as a manifestation of the "Russian soul". While acknowledging the importance of the nihilists' contribution to the ideologies of their time, the article focuses on the major role of the social and psychological features which structured this "mouvement" and represented the critical differentia that set it apart from the ideological groupings and tendencies of the era. These young men and women belonged to one and the same age group; most of them came from the nobility and had severed all links with home. Their primordial revolt was against their social milieu, their fathers and the noble family as they happened to know it from their own life experience. They met in or around the universities and congregated into closely knit groups, where they set up rules of behavior, of dress, and of speach that distinguished them from the "others". And they adhered to a strict code (kodeks) of their making and to a way of life that was the embodiment of their worldview. The article analyzes these features as manifestations of the nihilists' collective mentalité and counter culture, seen as original existential experiences far above and beyond the sole realm of ideas.

Alfred J. Rieber, The rise of engineers in Russia. The Russian engineering profession owes much of its professional ethos and ideology to the tradition of les grandes écoles as transmitted by French engineers imbued with St. Simonian ideals who staffed the Institute of Transportation Engineers in the early nineteenth century. Until then, Peter I's vision of a technological society had encountered resistance of the nobility to technical education, competing demands of the army for engineers and changing economic policies of the state. By the mid-nineteenth century Russian engineers controlled the Ministry of Transportation and firmly established a statist policy of economic development.

Yuri Felshtinsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and the Left Opposition in the USSR, 1918-1928. The year 1928 can be considered a major line of demarcation in Soviet history. Internally the country terminated the brief existence of NEP, and the forced collectivization of peasant agriculture was begun. In foreign policy the stormy expansionists decade of 1918-1927 ended with the unsuccessful revolution in China and was replaced by the relatively peaceful period of 1928-1937. In party politics the so-called "Left Opposition" was liquidated in 1928 as a legitimate political force; their physical destruction would come somewhat later. And with Trotsky's expulsion from the USSR in January 1929, the Left Opposition disappeared from the Soviet Union forever. In this article an attempt is made to analyze the sources of the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party and the reasons for its defeat, as well as the roles played by three Bolshevik leaders, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, in the ideological struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the first years of Soviet power. The article is based largely on materials from Trotsky's Archives preserved by the Houghton Library at Harvard University, portions of which have been published by the author in recent years.

Nora Buhks, The Proteus-novel (Nabokov's novel Dar/The gift). A close reading of the text sheds light on the nature of the opposition between structural principles such as homogeneity/fragmentarity of the narrative induced by the character of this work (Dar - a biographical novel) and by its thematical purpose (Dar is a novel bearing on literature of which it is a model in a variety of types). Another structural opposition is that between chronology and timelessness. The rejection of temporal dimension allows to comprise within the limits of the novel texts that belong to various periods and authors, and to substitute an aesthetic judgement for the guarantee of historical authenticity. Thus the structure of Dar is based on a coding principle which turns the novel into a crossword puzzle. A close examination of the structure of the work stresses the key-position of chapter IV as a clue to the various meaning of the novel.