Suchergebnisse

Like many genres, biography came belatedly to Russia. As with other such late arrivals, biography underwent intensive growth in quantity, sophistication, cultural significance and popularity from the era of Nicholas I onwards. It stands today as a dominant force in post-Soviet publishing. Yet studies of Russian biography's poetics and its role as a literary and cultural institution in the 19th and 20th centuries remain thin on the ground, a fact often lamented, yet not fully addressed, in the scattered writings on the subject. The present volume examines modern Russian biography as a literary form, a publishing phenomenon and a cultural force that reveals and contests hegemonic ideas of the role of the individual in society, and of the make-up of the human personality itself.

This article analyses the major changes in the publication and reception of Soviet biographies of Bolshevik heroes in the first two post-war decades, comparing the reforms undertaken by the two most important publishers of such biography, Molodaia gvardiia and Politizdat. The article argues that the 1950s and 1960s witnessed not just criticism of Bolshevik biographies' tendencies towards de-personalization and standardization, but also substantive reform to their writing, editing and reading, with the goal of evoking individual personality in a more emotionally involving and therefore politically effective way. The article argues that Soviet publishers were themselves well aware of the problems of Bolshevik biography; the reforms that they undertook to address these problems suggest some striking parallels with the debates about personality and biographical form that unfolded in Western European and American biographical criticism of the 1960s and beyond. It concludes that Bolshevik biography underwent a substantial 'literary turn' in the 1960s, laying the foundation for further formal experimentation, especially in the biographical novel, in late socialism.

This article compares two novels first submitted for Soviet publication in the mid-1960s, but only published during glasnost: Aleksandr Bek's New Appointment and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward. The latter, though, well known, has not been analysed in terms of its illness imagery; it has also never been compared with Bek's less-studied but strikingly similar work, in terms of the illness imagery in the texts and in their reception by several generations of Soviet readers. The article uses medical humanities approaches to disease literature and conceptual metaphor theory to trace the complexity of both novels' treatment of mental and physical illness. It argues that they compel us to reconsider cancer as a political metaphor, and Soviet illness rhetoric, suggesting that both can be used for more polyvalent and moderate critique than is usually assumed.

This paper examines the impact of minimum wage legislation in developing countries where coverage is incomplete. Using a rich data set from Ghana, it estimates the extent to which a binding minimum wage alters employment in both the formal and informal sectors of the labor market. The data reveal that Ghana's minimum wage policies during the 1970s and 1980s led to a reduction of formal sector jobs and an increase in informal sector jobs. In addition, there is some evidence to suggest that a large proportion of the displaced workers from the formal sector ended up working in the informal sector.

Public choice analysts argue that, while incentive mechanisms in competitive markets ensure consumer sovereignty, decisions in political processes conflict with voters' preferences. Voters are vulnerable because they are rationally apathetic. Yet, if this is so, how can high participation rates be explained? Evidence reveals that, in the absence of effective quid pro quo, behaviour differs systematically from that predicted of homo economicus. Here it is argued that, while participation cannot be explained in terms of an instrumental act (to affect outcome), it can be explained in terms of individuals' perceptions of the intrinsic value of the process itself. It follows that inherent mechanisms within representative democracy are capable of mitigating the more 'dismal' predictions of public choice analysis. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)