Introduction: The Short Story as the Genre of Cultural Transition / Lyudmila Parts -- Chekhov's "The Darling": Femininity Scorned and Desired / Svetlana Evdokimova -- Bunin's "Gentle Breath" / Lev Vygotsky -- Ekphrasis in Isaak Babel ("Pan Apolek," "My First Goose") -- Robert Maguire -- Zoshchenko's "Electrician," or the Complex Theatrical Mechanism / Aleksander Zholkovsky -- Yury Olesha's Three Ages of Man: A Close Reading of "Liompa" / Andrew Barratt -- Nabokov's Art of Memory: Recollected Emotion in "Spring in Fialta" (1936-1947) / John Burt Foster, Jr -- Child Perspective: Tradition and Experiment. An Analysis of "The Childhood of Luvers" by Boris Pasternak / Fiona Björling -- Andrei Platonov and the Inadmissibility of Desire ("The River Potudan") / Eric Naiman -- "This Could Have Been Foreseen": Kharms's "The Old Woman" (Starukha) Revisited. A Collective Analysis / Robin Milner-Gulland -- Testimony as Art: Varlam Shalamov's "Condensed Milk" / Leona Toker -- The Writer as Criminal: Abram Tertz's "Pkhents" / Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy -- Vasilii Shukshin's "Cut Down to Size" (Srezal) and the Question of Transition / Diane Ignashev Nemec -- Carnivalization of the Short Story Genre and the Künstlernovelle: Tatiana Tolstaia's "The Poet and the Muse" / Erica Greber -- Down the Intertextual Lane: Petrushevskaia, Chekhov, Tolstoy / Lyudmila Parts -- "The Lady with the Dogs," by Lyudmila Petrushevskaia / Translated by Krystyna Anna Steiger -- Russian Postmodernist Fiction and Mythologies of History: Viacheslav Pietsukh's "The Central-Ermolaevo War" and Viktor Erofeev's "Parakeet" / Mark Lipovetsky -- Psychosis and Photography: Andrei Bitov's "Pushkin's Photograph" / Sven Spieker -- The "Traditional Postmodernism" of Viktor Pelevin's Short Story "Nika" / Olga Bogdanova.