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The article explores the writing of Fr. Sergei Kruglov (b. 1966), a prominent practitioner of innovative Russian poetry, highlighting a complex evolution he underwent after embracing the Orthodox faith and becoming a priest, while continuing the experimental poetics that characterized his earlier work. Kruglov’s writing, frequently in an ekphrastic mode, reflects his background as a resident of a small and remote Siberian city; at the same time, it is suffused with dense cultural allusions and dialogue with Western literature, especially of the Baroque and Modernist eras. Kruglov’s writing is discussed in the theoretical contexts of postmodernist discourses on contemporary poetry and religion and socio-political contexts of contemporary Russia.

This article discusses the aesthetic and sociopolitical contexts of Zakhar Berkut, a 1972 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka, one of the leading figures of Ukrainian poetic cinema. An ambitious adaptation of a canonical nineteenth-century historical novel by Ivan Franko, it was conceived as the first big-budget Ukrainian historical film since World War II. An unusual and controversial hybrid of poetic cinema techniques and mainstream filmmaking oriented towards a mass audience, it became the last work of Ukrainian poetic cinema released before a severe state-sponsored crackdown brought the heyday of this film school to an abrupt end.

In this excerpt from the novel Twelve Circles, photographer Karl-Joseph Zumbrunnen takes leave of his earthly body and experiences an unexpected lightness of being. It is just before dawn on Easter Sunday, but he does not turn toward the resurrection of the rising sun; he sets instead on a westward flight, away from the Ukrainian town where he was killed, toward Vienna. His journey will follow the contour of the oval formed by the Carpathian Mountains, the center of Europe, according to the text, and take him from Transylvania, along the Danube, to a light-filled crowded stadium to which he is admitted after having answered a ritual question. The topography of his itinerary is matched by the topology of his memory, as he sees a forlorn lover working on the 112th page of a draft letter, various lovers sleeping in each other’s arms, and the train stations that were to be the subject of his next project. When his astral body is absorbed by the light of the stadium, the author takes leave of his readers, but not before knocking on wood.

This article discusses several Ukrainian writers who gained prominence during the post-Soviet period, in particular Vasyl Makhno, Serhii Zhadan, Andrii Bondar, Natalka Sniadanko, Oksana Lutsyshyna, and Dmytro Lazutkin. Grounded in theoretical models of cultural globalization, the analysis focuses on these authors' strategies of engagement with the rapidly changing global contexts in texts ranging from philosophical poetry to counterfactual fiction and appropriations of mass-culture forms.

The goal of this collective effort is to provide an overview of the course of Central European literatures in the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The authors have highlighted works they consider representative of their countries’ literary production and placed them in the context of the political and social changes they reflect. Where English translations of the works in question are available, they are listed in a bibliography attached to each article.

This article focuses on A Stone Cross (Kaminnyi khrest), a 1968 film by the Ukrainian director Leonid Osyka based on the work of the Ukrainian modernist writer Vasyl' Stefanyk, including the eponymous short story. While this film is regarded in the countries of the former Soviet bloc as one of the highest accomplishments of the poetic cinema movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, it has so far received little attention in the West. The present article examines the film-maker's choices made in adapting the literary texts, and especially the film's visual language, including its choice of setting, camerawork, editorial style and use of professional and non-professional actors, and the way these choices contribute to the work's overall dramatic impact. A key theme in this film, which narrates a peasant family's decision to emigrate to Canada in the late 1890s and the severance of its symbolic ties with the traditional rural community, is the deep identity crisis precipitated by the social upheavals o...

Summaries of the discussions at two recent conference sessions: “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” (MLA Annual Convention, 27 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC) and “Are We Postcolonial? Post-Soviet Space” (Annual Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, 29 Dec. 2005, Washington, DC).

While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.3r_chernetsky.html.

Introduction: Mapping Postsocialist Cultural StudiesMagdalena Zaborowska, Sibelan Forrester, and Elena Gapova Part I. (Re-)Visitations 1. How I Found Eastern Europe: Televisual Geography, Travel Sites, and Museum Installations Andaluna Borcila 2. The Nation In Between or, Why Intellectuals Do Things with Words Elena Gapova 3. Prenzlauer Berg Connections: The Trajectory of East German Samizdat Culture from Socialism to Capitalism Lisa Whitmore 4. Reading Transparent "Constructions of History" or, Three Passages through (In)Visible Warsaw Magdalena Zaborowska 5. Can Prague Learn from L.A.? Frank Gehry's Netherlands National Building in PragueDavid Houston 6. Heteroglossia and Linguistic Neocolonialism: English Teaching in Post-1989 Poland Bill Johnston 7. Projections of Desire: Robert D. Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts and the Crisis of Self-Definition Anca Rosu Part II. (Re-)Adaptations8. Shifting a Cultural Paradigm: Between the Mystique and the Marketing of Polish Theatre Halina Filipowicz 9. "Hurrah, I'm Still Alive!" East German Products Demonstrating East German Identities Rainer Gries 10. Cryptographic Art of Bratislava: Configurations of Absence in Postcommunist Installation Art Paul Krainak 11. "Move Over Madonna": Gender, Representation, and the "Mystery" of Bulgarian Voices Carol Silverman 12. Four Bearings of West for the Lviv Bohema Mark Andryczyk 13. "Don't Get Pricked!" Representation and the Politics of Sexuality in the Czech Republic Vera Sokolova Afterword: From Big Brother to Big Burger (And What's the Grand Narrative Got to Do with It?) "Benni Goodman"

VITALY CHERNETSKY The past decade witnessed major and unprecedented transformations in Ukrainian culture, and in literature in particular. Like other former Soviet republics, Ukraine attained independence following the dissolution of the USSR, yet its case stands out due to the nation's size, both territorially and in terms of population (which is, as Ukrainians are fond of pointing out, roughly equivalent to that of France), and also due to the lengthy history of aspirations and struggles for national liberation. Also, more perhaps than any other nation within the former Russian /Soviet empire, Ukraine endured a consistent and lengthy policy aimed at suppression and eradication of national identity, language, and culture. Persons ranging from ministers in tsarist governments to the "father" of socialist realism, Maksim Gorky, denied the very existence of a distinct Ukrainian language and culture, while in the wake of the mass purges of the national intelligentsia in the 1930s (which, sadly, dwarf in scope the similarly tragic cases of other former Soviet and East European nations), the officially permitted literature was by and large of the worst conformist kind. The brief "thaw" of the 1960s was likewise brutally cut short, and while the Ukrainian diaspora in the West is to be commended for preserving the legacy that was being