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and some have even a "once-upon-a-time" flavor; yet they are all of a scientific and dignified character. We wish to express our thanks to the authors and original publishers for permission to republish the articles; likewise to the publishers of the New International Encyclopaedia, for permission to include some of the excellent chemical articles contained therein. We shall feel under obligations to any one who calls our attention to suitable papers not now included. Later volumes will be devoted to other branches of science, and a bibliographical volume will contain interesting and inspiring sketches of the lives and work of some of the men who have either added to the stock of human knowledge or who have applied it to human needs.

The essays gathered for this double issue of Studies in East European Thought originated as contributions to a conference The Bolshevik Contagion held at the Neubauer Collegium of the University of Chicago on 2-3 November 2017. The purpose of the conference was severalfold. First, it was intended to commemorate the 1917 revolutions in Russia (and subsequent upheaval elsewhere in Europe) by re-examining some of their central theoretical texts. Second, the conference sought to investigate new paradigms for intellectual history (or the history of ideas) as a discipline uniting history, philosophy, political theory and critical theory. As the inaugural event of the long-term project Revolutionology: Media and Networks of Intellectual Revolution, the conference asked to what extent a major historical event can be correlated with intellectual sources and, concomitantly, how a close examination of these sources as events and as material artefacts can help us to understand the ideas as historical forces.Participants, drawn from a broad array of academic disciplines, were asked to present a paper on a single text from the intellectual legacy of Bolshevism, combining close textual analysis with a consideration of the text as the material node of an intellectual network. Selections ranged from The Communist Manifesto (James Farr) to The ABC of Revolution (Sheila Fitzpatrick) and History and Class Consciousness (Martin Jay) and Mikhail Lifshits's Marx and Engels about Art (David Riff). Given the variety of participants' disciplinary backgrounds, approaches ranged from the philological (i.e., an analysis of the text's internal structure and argument or of its adaptation in new texts) to those of social history or political theory. The result was a memorably intense and fertile discussion among participants and with the audience, the results of which are reflected in the essays published herewith.

In a widespread image of the late 1930s the Soviet state is represented as a garden tended by the wise and attentive Stalin. Not only does this garden naturalize the dynamic and multiethnic modern state as a single organic totality, as in Zygmunt Bauman's notion of the totalitarian “gardening state”; the garden also presents the Soviet state as a new ecology (rather than just an economy) based on homologous relations between nature, technology, industry, morality and aesthetics. In the strictly aesthetic dimension the image of the garden helps define Socialist Realism as a modeling aesthetic, that is, one that is directed at providing not only a mimetic microcosm, but also a means of governing the world. After analyzing the image of the Soviet state as garden in avant‐garde and Socialist Realist poets ranging from Nikolai Zabolotskii to Elizaveta Polonskaia, the essay focuses on its explication in the cinema, especially in Aleksandr Dovzhenko's 1949 film Michurin, which is read as a defense of Socialist Realism as a modeling aesthetic, as the nursery of a new material and aesthetic ecology, and as a science‐fiction pastoral.