Maria Grazia Bartolini. “In the Tight Triangle of the Night”: The Early Poetry of Yuriy Tarnawsky (1956–1971), between Modernism and Postmodernism. Ukrainian Studies Series. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024. 193 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $129.00, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 1

Deborah Allison. The Films of Aleksandr Rou: Father of Soviet Fairy-tale Cinema. Bristol, Eng.: Intellect, 2025. xxii, 221 pp. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. $122.95, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 4

Bruce O’Neill. Underground: Dream and Degradations in Bucharest. The City in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. xii, 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. 29.95, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 3

Abstract This essay looks at blackness in the USSR from its contested margins. Focusing on South Africans categorized as “Coloured,” I explore dynamics of translation, solidarity, misunderstanding, and invisibility that arose when differing systems of racial classification interacted. In South Africa under segregation and apartheid, an intermediate category emerged between the dominant white minority and the subjugated black majority: Coloured. As the USSR became involved in South African anti-racist struggles, Soviet citizens did not know how to see and understand these lighter-skinned people who did not fit neatly into Soviet preconceptions about darker-skinned people of African descent. A handful of Coloured activists took on particularly prominent roles representing the plight of black South Africans for Soviet audiences, and being lighter skinned shaped their experiences of the USSR in significant ways. Traversing the realms of Soviet policy, scholarship, cultural production, and everyday interactions, we see remarkable inconsistency in how Coloureds were regarded: as invisible and also hypervisible, artificial and also real, black and also not black. This essay traces Soviet trajectories of the liminal category “Coloured” to explore the extraordinary chaos at the edges of blackness in the USSR.

Anna Batori. The Extreme Cinema of Eastern Europe: Rape, Arts, (S)exploitation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024. vi, 188 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index. Film stills. $101.47, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 1

Sara G. Brinegar. Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound, 1920–29. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. xvi, 224 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $82.80, ebook. - Volume 84 Issue 2

Christopher Ely. Russian Populism: A History. The Bloomsbury History of Modern Russia Series. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. x, 255 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $35.95, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 3

Ilya Kliger. Sovereign Fictions: Poetics and Politics in the Age of Russian Realism. Thinking Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. vii, 287 pp. Notes. Index. 32.00, paper. - Volume 84 Issue 3

Dustin Condren. An Imaginary Cinema: Sergei Eisenstein and the Unrealized Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024. xv, 372 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $58.95, hard bound. - Volume 84 Issue 3