Tolstoy’s concise, highly suggestive short novel Hadji Murad (posthumously published in 1912) emphasizes war but also includes two distinct depictions of erotic attachment across the Russian/Muslim border.

If Stendhal was a theorist of love before becoming a novelist, and if Lawrence’s love novels became increasingly expository, Tolstoy represents a third alternative: his best thinking about love takes place in narrative. As Isaiah Berlin noted in a different context, he was a Heraclitean fox, splendidly attentive to varied details, rather than a hedgehog expounding one big idea.

Hadji Murad’s first key set of scenes gives parallel accounts of Nicholas I’s and the imam Shamil’s love lives, which undermine sharp distinctions between Christian monogamy and Muslim polygamy. Another group of scenes shows the responses of Murad and the Russian army officer Butler to Marya Dmitrievna, the lower-class mistress of another officer. These scenes of erotic attraction explore potential disruptions in boundaries between cultures and classes alike only to drop the possibility when this war-torn novel ends in brutal tragedy.

Further comparison with Stendhal and Lawrence addresses Fabrizio and Clélia in The Charterhouse of Parma and love conflict in “The Princess.” In highlighting each novelist’s fascination with love across borders, these situations bring out Tolstoy’s relative restraint in an intertextual series where treatment of this motif led to operatic grand passion or intimacy gone horribly awry.

The article presents the history of translation of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry into Hebrew. Khlebnikov (1885--1922), one of the founders of Russian Futurism, was a trailblazer of new linguistic and philosophic vistas in poetry. His poems are singularly difficult and original in their highly involved idiom and construction, as well as the subject-matter which borrows from such diverse fields as history, mythology, mathematics, and biology. The translations of his poems into Hebrew, starting with those by Lea Goldberg, Avraham Shlyonsky, and Eliyahu Tesler in the pioneering 1942 collection “Shirat Rusiia” (“The Poetry of Russia”) and ending with Aminadav Dykman’s in his magisterial anthology of Russian poetry “Dor Sheli -- Khaia Sheli: MiShirat Rusiia BaMea HaEsrim” (“My Generation, My Beast: Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century,” 2002), are characterized by ingenuity in rendering Khlebnikov’s “trans-sense” idiom while transposing his thoroughly Russian world-view into Hebrew realia. The article also discusses the Israeli reception of Khlebnikov as poet and philosopher, as reflected in Dan Avidan’s poetry and Mikhail Grobman’s paintings.

Barbara Pym’s novels of the 1950s are generally devoted to the representation of the life of educated single gentlewomen, but when she does choose to depict men, they do not conform to contemporary ideas of masculinity. This paper demonstrates Pym’s ambiguous treatment of several types of male characters and the traditional association between homosexuality and the Anglo-Catholic faction of the Anglican Church. Although in her presentation Pym refers to popular cultural attitudes and clichés, which were clear to her target audience but have to be explicated today (more than 50 years later), this use of stereotypes does not amount to moral judgment or condemnation. On the contrary, in a decade when homosexuals were outlawed and demonized, Pym represents them sympathetically and their lifestyle as a legitimate and somewhat intriguing choice.

The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.

The thesis of the paper is that Jews are represented in the poetry as the mimetic Other for identification, sponsoring fidelity to faith, the excluded Other allowing consolidation of faith, and the symbolic Other providing a discourse of history as theophany; in representation of the Jewish Other, the Anglo-Saxon textual community furthers the project of nation formation.

In Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness and Masque of Beauty an early modern argument against colonization is presented by an African character, Niger.  The themes of assimilation and self-determination remain in tension throughout the plays, a quite early recognition of the struggle between cultural identity, race, and global agendas.