The Undergraduate Journal of SLAVIC and EAST/CENTRAL EUROPEAN STUDIES

Dear Contributors,

Thank you for contributing to the Journal. For many of you, it may have been your first attempt at research and conference presentation and your first publication, and we applaud your efforts.

All the papers were produced in collaboration with your instructors, and they all deserve many thanks for encouraging, cajoling, and simply helping year after year. We hope this experience will be the stepping stone on the road to more research and intellectual discovery. We also hope that this conference and the Journal are going to become some of the Most Memorable Events of your undergraduate careers.

Dear Readers,

This is the first issue of the Journal that publishes the proceedings of the University of California Undergraduate Conference on Slavic and East/Central European Studies held annually at UCLA since 1998. May 2007 was the tenth anniversary of the conference, and we decided that it was time to publish the conference proceedings.

You can see the 2007 conference schedule and photographs at the following link: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/russian/undergrad07.html.

One of the requirements of the conference is that papers must incorporate some materials in a Slavic or East/Central European language. For example, beginning students might incorporate titles of books or articles or place names in the relevant language; intermediate students might read some passages from relevant sources; advanced students might base their paper on sources in the given language. Otherwise topics are wide open and depend entirely on students’ interests.

Over the years many undergraduates enrolled in a Slavic or East/Central European language, literature, linguistics, history, political science, music, folklore, or other classes have participated in the conference; twelve papers from the 2007 conference are presented here.

The production of the Journal was a collaborative effort:

• Yelena Furman, UCLA/UC Irvine, acted as a general editor.
• Elinor Huntington, UCLA, edited the papers.
• Scott Gruber and Zeke Victor, UCLA, designed the webpage.
• Susan Bauckus and Minh Nguyen, UCLA Center for World Languages, helped to produce the journal.
• Roman Koropeckyj, UCLA, served in an advisory capacity for the Journal.

Everyone’s help is most gratefully acknowledged.

The annual conferences and the production of the Journal have been sponsored by the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA Center for World Languages, UCLA International Institute and UCLA Center for European and Eurasian Studies. Their contributions serve as an assurance that that conference and the Journal will continue to be an annual event on the UCLA campus.

Sincerely,
Olga E. Kagan
Coordinator
UCLA Russian Language Program