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The commentaries on newly instituted jury trials in Russia that Dostoevsky provided in his Diary of a Writer during the 1870s has attracted scholarly attention mainly for the legal and moral issues he addresses in them. His commentary on two jury trials in particular–those of Kroneberg and Kornilova (both of which involve violence toward children)–has attracted most of this scholarly attention. The present article examines Dostoevsky's commentary on a different trial, that of Nastasia Kairova, an actress who attacked the estranged wife of her lover with a razor in an outburst of jealous passion. Rather than examine Dostoevsky's commentary on the Kairova case as an example of his views on moral, legal, criminal, and/or judicial issues, however, I will be exploring it against the background of the author's views on female sexuality. More specifically, I will be focusing upon how Dostoevsky's conceptualization of carnal desire as a violent and destructive passion shapes his understanding not only of sex and love, but also of justice and mercy. It thus influences in a very fundamental way his view of the role that love–maternal and conjugal as opposed to romantic and sexual–should play in helping to establish the moral structure of a life, a family, and a society. Dostoevsky believed that Kairova's crime of passion was triggered by the unbridling of her carnal lusts, by the unleashing of a dangerous and destructive appetite for power, aggression, and domination that he linked closely with sexual desire. As we will see, Kairova's unruly carnal lusts, in Dostoevsky's opinion, not only led to her violent crime of passion; they also stood in the way of her moral regeneration and spiritual redemption.

The genome of every organism is composed of millions of small chemical units called nucleobases, whose arrangement along a strand of DNA provides the recipe for the development of the organism.1 Bioinformaticists analyze patterns of bases in DNA, and by treating bases as an alphabet and genomes as texts have reinvented a number of techniques originally developed by philologists.2 But the sheer size of genomic texts has also forced bioinformatics to move beyond traditional philological methods and to use information processing and statistical techniques to analyze patterns that are otherwise too large or too subtle to be noted by the unaided eye. We have adapted some of these computer-aided methods from bioinformatics for the purpose of analyzing medieval texts, and demonstrate in this paper that our “lexomic” methods can be used to detect relationships between, and structures within, poetic texts in the Old English corpus. Specifically, we show that our methods can recognize the relationship between Daniel and Azarias and the divisions between Genesis A and B as well as those between Guthlac A and B and between Christ I, II, and III. We also demonstrate how lexomics can be used to shed light on the possible Cynewulfian affinity of Guthlac B and conclude that certain

L the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, as a number of scholars have reminded us recently, a heated debate erupted in Soviet public discourse over the so-called sexual question. The debate, which reached its peak near the end of the NEP era (1921-27), focused mainly on the question of what role love, marriage, and the family should now play in the lives of those who were currently engaged in the process of dismantling the old bourgeois order and creating a new Communist society in Russia. Two alternativeand diametrically opposed-positions toward the polovoi vopros quickly emerged: an open, liberal, if not radical, attitude that viewed sexual energy in a positive way as a liberating force that would free people from the stultifyingly repressive, hypocritical, oldfashioned morality that had regulated life within bourgeois society (an attitude that for a long time was closely, yet erroneously, associated with the purported "free-love" advocate, Aleksandra Kollontai); and a repressed (and repressive), conservative, somewhat puritanical attitude that considered libido a dangerous and damaging force in private life that must somehow be restrained and subordinated to the public interest of advancing the

Given the highly carnivalized view of the world that informs the narrative structure of Envy (Zavist'. 1927), one should not be terribly surprised to find that Iurii Olesha's controversial novella contains gastronomic and alimentary motifs that function in a highly Rabelaisian way, with food imagery being called upon to celebrate what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the "material bodily principle" ("images of the human body itself, food, drink, defecation, and sexual life") and thus to express a joyful sense of satiety, abundance, and excess.! Indeed, Olesha's story fairly reverberates with images of gluttonous overeating, heavy drinking, and physical corpulence, all of which Bakhtin identifies with the "grotesque body" portrayed in works of carnivalized literature.2 From the tubby "aristocratic" torso of Andrei Babichev, the Soviet salami king, to the flaccid figure of Anechka Prokopovich, the cook for the barbers' artel (who goes about entangled in the entrails of animals), Envy quite deliberately foregrounds the essential corporeality of the human body and emphasizes many of its basic physiological functions: among them, mastication, ingestion, digestion, and elimination. The novella opens, appropriately enough, within the very "bowels" (nedra) of Andrei Babichev's apartment, his bathroom, where the effervescent food commissar can be

A lthough nostalgia was originally a term used to denote a medical pathology (in the seventeenth century, "homesickness" was diagnosed as a dangerous health disorder), it has subsequently become identified with a much less dangerous or pathological condition.1 It now tends to indicate a state of mind characterized by wistful regret or a sense of loss over a time and place now long gone, combined with a sentimental longing to escape back to what is remembered as being a much simpler world.2 That simpler world for which one

In many learning situations, we need to determine to which cues to attend, particularly in cases when these cues conflict. These conflicts appear often in English orthography. In two experiments, we asked children to spell two-syllable words that varied on two dimensions: morphological and orthographic structure. In one set of these words, the two sources of information conflicted. Results of Experiment 1 suggest that seven- to nine-year-old children are sensitive to both orthographic and morphological dimensions of words, and that this dual sensitivity sometimes leads to correct spelling and sometimes to incorrect spelling. Results of Experiment 2 suggest that orthographic information dominates young (six-year-old) children's spelling, at least in a case when there is a strong orthographic regularity. Taken together, these experiments suggest that children are sensitive to the multiple dimensions of regularity in English orthography and that this sensitivity can lead to mistakes.

M ikhail Bulgakov's Sobach'e serdtse (1925), most critics would agree, is essentially the tale of a transformation gone awry: it tells the story of how a scientistthrough a misguided organ transplant operation-turns "a perfectly delightful dog" into a disgustingly vulgar quasi-human being.' As Helena Goscilo explains, "those human qualities that made Sharik so winsome are replaced in Sharikov by baser impulses."2 Few readers, I think, would seriously dispute the view that what stands at the center of Bulgakov's satiric novella is this ill-fated transformation of Sharik (the pleasant dog) into Sharikov (the unpleasant man), a change that is generally interpreted as serving to parody the grand social experiment of creating a new species of human being: homo sovieticus. It seems to me, however, that readers of Sobach'e serdtse tend to overlook a metamorphosis of almost equal significance that occurs earlier in the narrative when Sharik is first taken in off the street by Philipp Philippovich and brought home to live with him.3 Upon trading his wretched freedom for the material comforts provided in the wealthy doctor's home, this clever canine vagabond rapidly changes his class identity and transforms himself from a homeless mutt

Although the tendency to compare native authors with leading figures from modem and classical European literature is by no means restricted to Russia alone, the practice has certainly flourished in that country over the past two hundred years. Long before Vasilii Aksenov was dubbed the "Slavic Salinger" during the 1960s, writers in Russia had come to tolerate a custom whereby critics measured the poetics or the style of their works against the model provided by some of the world's greatest authors. They then had to bear the distinction-usually honorific but sometimes dubious-of being hailed as the "new" or "Russian" Homer, Pindar, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Hoffmann, and so on'. This practice dates at least as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century, when men of letters in Russia turned to Europe on an unprecedented scale in search of literary, philosophical, and cultural models. Whether or not the practice can be explained away as merely the manifestation of a deep-seated cultural inferiority complex felt by Russians vis-a-vis the West, the fact remains that such comparisons with classic European writers were often made and the resulting epithets frequently bestowed upon Russian writers.2