A Standard Ruble of Account for Russian Bussiness History, 1769–1914: A Note
"In this way one may lose ten silver rubles," said the cornet, looking at Liza, and wishing to enter into a conversation with her. "Are you not playing with assignats?" Anna Fedorovna asked, looking at everybody. "I do not know how it is,—I can't count by assignats," said the count. "How is it? What is an assignat?" "Nowadays nobody any longer counts by assignats," interposed the uncle, who had been winning, playing with the flintstone. —Lev. N. Tolstoy, Two Hussars
Contract Enforcement in Russian Serf Society, 1750–1860
This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.