In response to the stern image of Rachmetov in Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the interest in which was considerably enhanced by an article coming from the pen of Dmitrii I. Pisarev, three major Russian works of 1868 -- Fedor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the final installments of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (where Platon Karataev appears), and Alexey K. Tolstoy’s play Tsar Fedor Ioannovich -- create their own versions of what Dostoevsky called “a positively beautiful person.” The three works were responses to a profound inner need felt in the contemporary Russian society, and they implicitly pit Chernyshevsky’s revolutionary version of imitatio Christi against their own hagiographical images in which the saintly opposition to mundane or hegemonic values is combined with a restrained comicality that both invites and distances the sympathy of the reader.
Born in Vitebsk, Russia, a graduate of Leningrad State University, Professor Serman (1913--2010) of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem served in the Soviet Army during World War II. In 1949 he was arrested on the charge of “anti-Soviet agitation” and spent five years in a labor camp in Kolyma. In 1956--1976 he was a senior research associate in Pushkinskii Dom (The Institute of Literature of the Academy of Science of the USSR) in Leningrad; in 1965--1975 he taught in the philology department of Leningrad University. In 1979 he emigrated to Israel. He is the author of Poeticheskii stil’ Lomonosova [The Style of Lomonosov’s Poetry (1965)], Derzhavin (1967), Russkii klassitsizm [Russian Classicism (1973)]; his books Konstantin Batiushkov (1974) and Mikhail Lomonosov: Life and Poetry (1988) were published in English translation by Twayne Publishers in New York and The Centre of Slavic and Russian studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, respectively.
The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.
June 2005: Ruth Bienstock Anolik received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and teaches at Villanova University. Most of her work focuses on the Gothic with a special interest in the interplay between Gothic literature and social and cultural structures. Her publications include: “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic” and “Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Female Retellings of Jewish Folktales” in Modern Language Studies”; “Horrors of Possession: The Gothic Struggle with the Law” in Legal Studies Forum; “‘All Words, Words, about Words:’ Linguistic Journey and Transformation in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers” in Studies in American Jewish Literature. She has recently completed editing a collection of essays, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination published by McFarland, and is currently at work on two projects: a companion collection on the sexual other in the Gothic, also to be published by McFarland, and a book on the concept of possession in the Gothic mode.
A new method has been developed for measuring local adsorption rates of metal ions at interfaces based on scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM). The technique is illustrated with the example of Ag+ binding at Langmuir phospholipid monolayers formed at the water/air interface. Specifically, an inverted 25 microm diameter silver disc ultramicroelectrode (UME) was positioned in the subphase of a Langmuir trough, close to a dipalmitoyl phosphatidic acid (DPPA) monolayer, and used to generate Ag+ via Ag electro-oxidation. The method involved measuring the transient current-time response at the UME when the electrode was switched to a potential to electrogenerate Ag+. Since the Ag+/Ag couple is reversible, the response is highly sensitive to local mass transfer of Ag+ away from the electrode, which, in turn, is governed by the interaction of Ag+ with the monolayer. The methodology has been used to determine the influence of surface pressure on the adsorption of Ag+ ions at a phospholipid (dipalmitoyl phosphatidic acid) Langmuir monolayer. It is shown that the capacity for metal ion adsorption at the monolayer increased as the density of surface adsorption sites increased (by increasing the surface pressure). A model for mass transport and adsorption in this geometry has been developed to explain and characterise the adsorption process.[on SciFinder (R)]
In many situations, the decision maker observes items in sequence and needs to determine whether or not to retain a particular item immediately after it is observed. Any decision rule creates a set of items that are selected. We consider situations where the available information is the rank of a present observation relative to its predecessors. Certain "natural" selection rules are investigated. Theoretical and Monte Carlo results are presented pertaining to the evolution of the number of items selected, measures of their quality and the time it would take to amass a group of a given size. A comparison between rules is made, and guidelines to the choice of good procedures are offered.
G Fibich, Gaeta, A , Moll, K , Ilan, B , Dubietis, A , Tamosauskas, G , Eisenmann, S , ו Zigler, A . 2005. “Self-Focusing And Multiple Filamentation Of Intense Laser Pulses”. בתוך International Quantum Electronics Conference, 2005., Pp. 1792–1793. IEEE Computer Society.
Gadi Fibich, Eisenmann, Shmuel , Ilan, Boaz , Erlich, Yossi , Fraenkel, Moshe , Henis, Zohar , Gaeta, Alexander L, ו Zigler, Arie . 2005. “Self-Focusing Distance Of Very High Power Laser Pulses”. Optics Express, 13, Pp. 5897–5903.
This study describes the difficulties confronting the settlers of the Gaza strip in light of the current disengagement. It highlights both their distinguishing and similar characteristics and the impacts of their various attitudes on key issues: a religious world-view, an ideology of holding the land, economic concerns, socio-communal ties and individual psychological angst.
