Abstract George Whetstone’s promotion of moral conduct in The Rocke of Regard is closely tied to his legal interests, with slander emerging as a central theme across the three versified novellas in the collection. The slander theme reflects Whetstone’s background, his personal involvement in a legal slander case, and his belief in the societal importance of honour. The essay ultimately situates Whetstone’s engagement with slander within his broader literary work and his role in popularizing the controversial Italian(ate) short narratives in Elizabethan England.

Abstract This article examines an enigmatic sentence that links Walter Benjamin’s Hunchback Dwarf to Franz Kafka’s Odradek via their particular laughter. Analysing this laughter leads to various themes of consistent significance for Benjamin: the language of nature and things, the creature and negative theology embedded into the dialectic connection between horror and cheerfulness. Like in sediment, laughter sublates a long development, whose understanding shines a light on past and current evaluations of laughter and their complementary connections to experience.

Abstract In their introduction to Values of Literature, Hanna Meretoja and Pyro Lyytikäinen argue that ‘little attention has been paid to the ethical relevance of different literary genres and to the very different functions of literary texts that make literature valuable’.1 Literature has several ‘uses’ according to Rita Felski (2008), amongst which are the ‘knowledge’ and ‘shock’ elements insofar as they enable readers to change their perception of the world. Examining what I term ‘refugee memoirs’ as an emergent genre and its uses in enabling readers to interrogate dominant discourses about refugees in the UK, Europe and North America, I argue that refugee memoirs contest right-wing narratives that seek to shape society’s view of asylum-seekers and refugees and enable readers to see refugees' lived experiences through new perspective. Thereby, these narratives also permit a rehumanization of refugees and a comprehension of their losses and positions.

ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE DEVELOPS through paradigm shifts, which can be facilitated by world-changing events.I am writing this piece thinking about my own research on an earlier shift, spearheaded by scholars from Eastern and Central Europe a hundred years ago, when old certainties were productively questioned in a range of academic fields. 1 Some epistemological issues that are raised today echo what was said in the early twentieth century, when Euro-/West-centric understandings of cultures began to be creatively critiqued. 2World War I facilitated imperial disintegrations and early Soviet actors used decolonization discourse to describe the demise of the tsarist empire. 3 During the 1928-31 Soviet 'cultural revolution' decolonization discourse reached its peak, while also acquiring destructive forms under intense political pressure.Notably, it is not only under totalitarianism that ideologically charged campaigns can affect academic research.I remember how the heightened politicization of what used to be called Soviet Studies played out in Western academia in my lifetime.This contradictory history informs my response to the article by Byford, Doak and Hutchings in relation to the three main issues it raises: the relationship between political activism and academic research, what 'Russian Studies' is and the field's relationship to the 'decolonization agenda', which is salient again.In the context of world-changing events, the scales often fall from our eyes, encouraging a reassessment of what used to be taken for granted and allowing us to see what was previously ignored.Russia's war on Ukraine is such an event.One of my thoughts in February 2022 was how scholars of Russia failed to account for the nature of its current political system.We should have also attributed a greater significance to the mainstreaming, under Putin, of the irredentist visions of 'Russian nationhood' that had been regarded as extreme in the 1990s.The glorification of Russia's imperial legacy, as well as the Russian media campaign against Ukraine, should have been more systematically studied.The list of reasons for selfrecrimination can be easily expanded.At the same time, I recognize how difficult it is constructively to rethink the state of a discipline when dramatic events are unfolding.One can recall theories of democratic transition in the 1990s. 4 Which student of Russia would subscribe to them now?