The volume contains ten new essays on Russian literature and thought of the classical age (roughly 1820-1880). The essays are based on papers delivered at the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies held at Harrogate in July 1990. It strikes a balance between fresh work on major authors (Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev and Dostoevsky), important work on hitherto neglected minor authors (Marlinsky, Pisemsky and Boborykin), and studies that relate to thinkers of the period (Chaadaev, Herzen and Bakunin).

The Czech and Slovak Experience assembles essays by leading specialists from the USA, Canada, Britain and Czechoslovakia on key aspects of modern Czech and Slovak history: Joseph II's contribution to the development of the Czech national movement, the troubled relationship between Czechs and Slovaks as seen through Czech and Slovak eyes, Slovak linguistic separatism, the emergence of political democracy in post-Versailles Czechoslovakia, Masaryk as a religious heretic, Czechoslovakia's Germans and their treatment by the Czechoslovak government, and Prague's Jewish community after 1918.