Expectation is an integral part of the reading experience. As we read a text, we begin to classify it and compare it to others with which it seems to share a family resemblance. Drama is a particularly rich and rewarding field for studying the complex ways in which such expectations are created. Theatre audiences and readers of plays are encouraged in a variety of ways to guess at what might unfold on the stage and on the page, and much of the pleasure of the theatrical experience revolves around this guessing game. Plays of Expectations explores these expectations through the lens...

War in a European Borderland examines the many regime changes that took place in occupied Ukraine during World War I. The decimation of people living between Austria-Hungary and the Russian empire - specifically Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and the population of the Baltic states - extended to the destruction of their homeland as well, where most of the fighting occurred. Russian, German, and Austrian occupiers all worked to shape regimes in these borderland territories and the wartime policies and discriminatory legislation enacted upon this region exacerbated ethnic...

Drawing on extensive research in Russian archives, Robert Croskey examines how Alexandra Tolstoy, the youngest daughter of Russian writer Lev (Leo) Tolstoy, sought to preserve the work of her father after the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. Best known as the founder and lifelong president of the Tolstoy Foundation in New York, where she worked to assist Russian emigres, Alexandra Tolstoy was determined to maintain her family's estate at Iasnaia Poliana as a museum and living memorial to her father's ideals; in addition, she was involved with the Tolstoy museums in Moscow and in...