(Read the full column at web.mac.com/kritika/iWeb/ekritika/Marketing/ Marketing.html or http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri (Project MUSE).
This "From the Editors" column discusses a worrying trend in the field of Russian history: the mass-market commercialization of scholarly publishing. The nexus of literary agents, sales pressures, and the prospect of financial gain (in some cases even a movie contract) can have a corrosive effect on scholarly pursuits. Possible pitfalls include the prospect that popularization is passed off as innovative scholarship; topics are restricted to what supposedly interests general readers; and authors become careless about citing sources, use hired researchers and translators instead of doing the work themselves, and otherwise cut corners. Academia itself is not immune, with many university departments looking favorably on mass- market trade publishing.
From the opposite standpoint, high-quality popularization is important and valuable, and commercial publishing is now becoming the domain of some of the profession's leading practitioners.
How much of a threat is the blending of scholarship with business to the integrity of the profession? Readers are invited to contribute their opinions and comments.
Please join the debate at web.mac.com/kritika/iWeb/ekritika/Marketing/ Marketing.html , either by clicking the link on the page or by sending an e-mail directly to ekritika@mac.com .
Carolyn Pouncy Managing Editor Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History cpouncy@umd.edu
Contents
From the Editors Marketing Russian History 497
Forum: Tolstoi, Orthodoxy, and Terrorism INESSA MEDZHIBOVSKAYA Tolstoi’s Response to Terror and Revolutionary Violence 505
PÅL KOLSTØ The Elder at Iasnaia Poliana: Lev Tolstoi and the Orthodox Starets Tradition 533
Reaction WILLIAM NICKELL New Directions in Tolstoi Scholarship 555
Article STEPHEN LOVELL From Genealogy to Generation: The Birth of Cohort Thinking in Russia 567
Review Essays WILLARD SUNDERLAND The Last of the White Moustaches: Recent Books on the Anti-Bolshevik Commanders of the East 595
MALTE GRIESSE Soviet Subjectivities: Discourse, Self-Criticism, Imposture 609
MICHAEL D. GORDIN Was There Ever a “Stalinist Science”? 625
Reviews NADIESZDA KIZENKO John-Paul Himka and Andriy Zayarnyuk, eds., Letters from Heaven: Popular Religion in Russia and Ukraine; M. V. Korogodina, Ispoved´ v Rossii v XIV–XIX vekakh: Issledovanie i teksty [Confession in 14th- to 19th-Century Russia: A Study and Primary Texts] 641
Martina Winkler Mary W. Cavender, Nests of the Gentry: Family, Estate, and Local Loyalties in Provincial Russia; John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism; Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society, and the Arts in Imperial Russia: The Pleasure and the Power 655
GREGORY VITARBO Stephen M. Norris, A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812–1945; Pavel Petrovich Shcherbinin, Voennyi faktor v povsednevnoi zhizni russkoi zhenshchiny v XVIII–nachale XX vekov [The War Factor in the Everyday Life of Russian Women from the 18th to the Beginning of the 20th Centuries]; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning, eds., Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution 668
ALEXEI MILLER Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 679
SARAH BADCOCK Peter Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: A Social and Economic History; Ol´ga Sergeevna Porshneva, Krest´iane, rabochie i soldaty Rossii nakanune i v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny [Peasants, Workers, and Soldiers of Russia before and during World War I] 685
MAIKE LEHMANN El´dar Rafik ogly Ismailov, Azerbaidzhan: 1953–1956 gg. Pervye gody “ottepeli” [Azerbaijan, 1953–56: The First Years of the “Thaw”] 694
Contributors to This Issue 701