Five Adventure Stories: Americans in Stalin’s Moscow (Lapina, Galina. Americans in Moscow, 1930–1940. Moscow: Litfakt Publ., 2023. 206 p.)

The monograph by Russian-American researcher, translator and critic Galina Lapina Americans in Moscow: 1930–1940 is dedicated to pre-war Soviet-American theatrical, educational, cinematic, diplomatic, literary contacts. Among the heroes of the book are American Ambassador Joseph E. Davis and his chauffeur Charles Ciliberti, writers Langston Hughes and Dorothy West, playwright Sophie Treadwell, actress Blanche Yurka and other writers, artists, diplomats, journalists who came to the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s. The book consists of five chapters; each of them is devoted to a certain episode of Soviet-American connections: the failed film project Black and White; The Promised Land, Sophie Treadwell's play about Soviet life; Moscow theater festivals of 1933–1937; history of the Anglo-American Institute (1933–1935), Moscow summer school for American students; a comparison of two books about the USSR — Joseph E. Davis’ Mission to Moscow (1943) and Charles Siliberti’s Backstage Mission to Moscow (1946), that show Soviet reality from the opposing points of view. The book that is, in fact, a collection of articles, is however marked by unity and integrity; it reconstructs the general context of the period in question on the basis of the extensive material. Memoirs, correspondence, archival documents, Soviet and American press form a vivid picture of Soviet-American relations in the pre-war decade. Many sources revealing American attitudes towards the USSR used by the author, have not yet been translated or published in Russia. Galina Lapina’s book encourages further research and publishing projects

“A Philistine Writer Whining in a Swamp”: Soviet Readers’ First Acquaintance with Ernest Hemingway

The paper examines early Soviet reception of Ernest Hemingway's works. The research is based on the readers’ letters to Goslitizdat (State Publishing House) from the funds of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (RGALI). A small collection of letters (1935–1936) shows readers’ reaction to the first Hemingway’s Soviet book editions: a short story collection Death in the Afternoon (1934) and Fiesta (1935). The readers unanimously condemn Hemingway for his “decadent” prose and Goslitizdat for publishing such “absurd” and “harmful” books. The only exception is a short positive review of the novel A Farewell to Arms (1936) sent to Goslitizdat in 1937. To uncover the reasons for the negative readers’ reception one should turn to the literary criticism of the 1934–1935, especially the essays by Ivan Kashkin who introduced the new author to the Soviet reading audience. A comparative analysis of readers’ feedback and critical discourse shows that the ambivalent and even contradictory image of the writer created by the critics made the readers think of Hemingway’s works as “decadent”, “bourgeois” and alien to Soviet people. Another reason was the innovative nature of Hemingway’s modernist prose which seemed obscure, confusing and unintelligible; the Soviet reader obviously preferred “clarity” and “simplicity” of Erskine Caldwell’s or Theodore Dreiser’s realistic writings. The situation changed by the 1937, when Hemingway was praised by both Soviet critics and readers as an anti-fascist writer, a heroic defender of the Spanish Republic

Theodore Dreiser in Leningrad. New Materials

Theodorе Dreiser was invited to the USSR to take part in the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. His visit to the Soviet Union that lasted over two months (November 4, 1926 — January 13, 1928) has been documented and studied quite well: Dreiser's Russian diary that he kept during his travel was published almost 30 years ago, and four years ago its Russian translation appeared. Another source is Ruth Epperson Kennell’s book Theodore Dreiser and the USSR. A First- Hand Chronicle (1969). A number of studies and scholarly publications are devoted to Dreiser’s trip; however, new materials and documents that contribute to more detailed reconstruction of Dreiser’s Russian journey still are being found in the archives. New documents from the funds of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) that highlight Dreiser’s stay in Leningrad (November 26 — December 2, 1927) are published in the Addendum to the article: a report submitted to VOKS by Sergei Trivas, officer for Anglo-American countries, who accompanied Dreiser as a guide and interpreter, and a letter of gratitude from Dreiser to Nikolai Derzhavin, VOKS representative in Leningrad

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE: AFRICAN AMERICAN RESPONSES

The paper gives a survey of the main stages in African American interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. After the publication of the novel, African American periodicals in the USA and Canada were publishing a wide range of reviews, essays, poems, and sketches reacting to Stowe’s book. Frederick Douglass was praising the book in his newspaper; there appeared, however, some aggressively critical responses, such as three letters by Martin Delany, a Black radial activist, written to the Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper in 1853. The argument of Delany and Douglass became a matrix for the further polemic based on the opposition of integrationist and afrocentrist approaches to the novel. This binary opposition remains practically unchanged until the Harlem renaissance, when African American writers and scholars (J. Weldon Johnson, W. S. Braithwaite, W. Thurman) become more critical, describing the novel as full of humiliating stereotypes, and its author as totally unable to properly understand and depict the Black race. The turning point in the assessment of the novel in the 20th century was Richard Wright’s collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and James A. Baldwin’s essay Everybody’s Protest Novel (1949) – a criticism of “protest fiction” from Beecher Stowe to Richard Wright. Baldwin’s essay heralded the shift towards the Sixties hostile crusade against “uncle Tomism”, when Stowe’s protagonist was referred to as a symbol of servility and race betrayal, which was a complete inversion of the cultural myth of a Black Messiah that underlies the character. The final part of the paper analyzes the situation in current African American studies and in particular H. L. Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and in the African American history in the 1990–2000s

N,N′-Fused Bisphosphole: Heteroaromatic Molecule with Two-Coordinate and Formally Divalent Phosphorus. Synthesis, Electronic Structure, and Chemical Properties

The reduction of 6,12-dichloro-1,2,3,4,7,8,9,10-octahydro-6<i>H</i>,12<i>H</i>-[1,2,3]­benzodiazaphospholo­[2,1-<i>a</i>]­[1,2,3]­benzodiazaphosphole (<b>3</b>) by metallic magnesium in tetrahydrofuran (THF) affords the N,N′-fused bisphosphole <b>1</b> in 92% yield. The compound reveals a novel type of 10π-electron heteroaromatic system [NICS(0) = −11.4], containing a two-coordinate and formally divalent phosphorus atom. Compound <b>1</b> possesses a much higher coordination activity than many other diazaphospholes. This is caused by a novel type of complexation to a metal ion wherein the lone phosphorus pairs are not involved in metal coordination. Instead, the 10π-electron heteroaromatic system provides two electrons for P → M bond formation. Polarization of the ligand results in the formation of extended molecular associates or cluster compounds. Complexes of <b>1</b> with mercury dichloride [{(<b>1</b>)₃HgCl}₂(μ₆-Cl)]⁺Cl^– (<b>7</b>) and tin dichlorides [<b>1</b>·SnCl₂(PhMe solvate)] (<b>8a</b>) and [<b>1</b>·SnCl₂] (<b>8b</b>) are, in fact, supramolecular in nature, containing multiple intermolecular short contacts. Crystals of complex <b>8a</b> containing short Sn···Sn packing interactions were converted reversibly to metallic tin after workup with THF. The simple mixing of <b>1</b> and <b>3</b> (1:1) gave a P–P bridging dimeric species prone to easy dissociation. The addition of GeCl₂(diox) to the equimolar mixture of <b>1</b> and <b>3</b> shifted the equilibrium to the formation of a poorly soluble salt-like dimer <b>6</b>, which is, in fact, a stacked 18π-electron dication having a through-space delocalization of π electrons

N,N′-Fused Bisphosphole: Heteroaromatic Molecule with Two-Coordinate and Formally Divalent Phosphorus. Synthesis, Electronic Structure, and Chemical Properties

The reduction of 6,12-dichloro-1,2,3,4,7,8,9,10-octahydro-6<i>H</i>,12<i>H</i>-[1,2,3]­benzodiazaphospholo­[2,1-<i>a</i>]­[1,2,3]­benzodiazaphosphole (<b>3</b>) by metallic magnesium in tetrahydrofuran (THF) affords the N,N′-fused bisphosphole <b>1</b> in 92% yield. The compound reveals a novel type of 10π-electron heteroaromatic system [NICS(0) = −11.4], containing a two-coordinate and formally divalent phosphorus atom. Compound <b>1</b> possesses a much higher coordination activity than many other diazaphospholes. This is caused by a novel type of complexation to a metal ion wherein the lone phosphorus pairs are not involved in metal coordination. Instead, the 10π-electron heteroaromatic system provides two electrons for P → M bond formation. Polarization of the ligand results in the formation of extended molecular associates or cluster compounds. Complexes of <b>1</b> with mercury dichloride [{(<b>1</b>)₃HgCl}₂(μ₆-Cl)]⁺Cl^– (<b>7</b>) and tin dichlorides [<b>1</b>·SnCl₂(PhMe solvate)] (<b>8a</b>) and [<b>1</b>·SnCl₂] (<b>8b</b>) are, in fact, supramolecular in nature, containing multiple intermolecular short contacts. Crystals of complex <b>8a</b> containing short Sn···Sn packing interactions were converted reversibly to metallic tin after workup with THF. The simple mixing of <b>1</b> and <b>3</b> (1:1) gave a P–P bridging dimeric species prone to easy dissociation. The addition of GeCl₂(diox) to the equimolar mixture of <b>1</b> and <b>3</b> shifted the equilibrium to the formation of a poorly soluble salt-like dimer <b>6</b>, which is, in fact, a stacked 18π-electron dication having a through-space delocalization of π electrons

Universal Dependencies 2.8.1

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). Version 2.8.1 fixes a bug in 2.8 where a portion of the Dutch Alpino treebank was accidentally omitted

Universal Dependencies 2.10

Universal Dependencies is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008)