Although the European Union (EU) was occasionally presented in a positive light in the lower house of the Russian parliament (the State Duma) in 1994–2004, there were also numerous criticisms of the EU and the “European community” in a broader sense. The discussions were accompanied by vocally articulated anxieties by those factions that were…[Read more]

In 2023, a new museum opened in Tbilisi, at the Writer’s House of Georgia that previously house the Soviet Writers’ Union: The Museum of Repressed Writers. The museum honours the executed poets from Georgia’s Soviet past, poets whose identities Soviet authorities tried to destroy. This article examines the story the museum tells about Soviet l…[Read more]

In recent decades, age studies has started to emerge as a new approach to study children’s literature. This book builds on that scholarship but also significantly extends it by exploring age in various aspects of children’s literature: the age of the author, the characters, the writing style, the intended readership and the real reader. Mor…[Read more]

Dreams can function in children’s books as a means to connect young characters and
older figures in the story. This article presents three methods to study intergenerational
encounters in and through dreams in a selection of contemporary Dutch children’s
books. First, a digital analysis of a corpus of 81 books shows that the older the cha…[Read more]

Diverging definitions and uses of concepts such as “ageism,” “aetonormativity,” “adultism,” and “childism” point at the relative separateness of the fields of childhood studies, age studies, and children’s literature studies, while also highlighting their shared interest in questions of age, prejudice, and agency. This article uses John Wall’s…[Read more]

When gender is brought into concerns about older people, the emphasis often lies on stereotypes connected to older women, and few comparative studies have been conducted pertaining to the representation of the intersection between older age and gender in fiction. This article argues that not only children’s literature, traditionally considered t…[Read more]

The prominent Russian writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) was known mainly for his work on the Soviet prison camps. In many of his fictional and non-fiction works, however, Solzhenitsyn dealt with the subject of Germany. This article analyses Solzhenitsyn’s depiction of Germany in the works August 1914, The Gulag A…[Read more]

Focusing on the debates in the First and Second State Duma of the Russian Empire, the article argues that the imperial parliament was the site for articulating and developing multiple approaches to political community. Together with the better studied particularistic discourses, which were based on ethno-national, religious, regional, social…[Read more]

The article discusses various meanings which were ascribed to religion in the parliamentary debates of the perestroika period, which included Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and other religious and lay deputies. Understood in a general sense, religion was supposed to become the foundation or an element of a new ideology and stimulate Soviet or…[Read more]

This chapter provides an overview of dependent constitution-making under one-party regimes in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, North Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia during the first decade after the Second World War. Employing and further developing the concept of the informal Soviet empire, it…[Read more]

Over the course of the twentieth century, a broad array of parties as organizations of a new type took over state functions and replaced state institutions on the territories of the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg Empires. In the context of roughly simultaneous imperial and postimperial transformations, organizations such as the…[Read more]

This book examines the political parties which emerged in the former Ottoman, Qing, Russian, and Habsburg empires and not only took over government power, but merged with government itself. It discusses how these parties, disillusioned with previous constitutional and parliamentary reforms, justified their takeovers with programs of controlled or…[Read more]