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Foreword Last night I had a dream of Uberation. I was at a social event of some kind in a large, labyrinthine mansion. It was very late at night. People were eating breakfasts on tables spread with white Unen. Shuffling through dark haUways between Ughted rooms, I was bored, uninvolved, tense. Outside on the lawn, someone showed me a simple game, in which you bend down and, using your knuckles like a monkey, run through the forest. This monkey gaUop was surprisingly easy to do. I could move very fast even among thickets, between trees. The animal posture helped me comprehend the night forest in a new way. I had so much fun at this new sport that, back inside the mansion, moving between the Üghted rooms, I gaUoped in the monkey posture, excited, through the dark haUs. My dreams are often visited by a commentator, a kind of "narrator" from the real world. He first appeared when, as a boy, I was under the speU of chronic nightmares. In one particularly bad dream, this voice made his rather dramatic entry, breaking through the Ulusion of the dream and saying, "This is only a dream, so don't be afraid." He continued to be my champion in succeeding nightmares, defeating their grip on me. To this day, he still occasionaUy drops in, and in the monkey dream he became very involved, standing in the background asking questions Uke, "I wonder if this reaUy can be done? Is it a sport in the waking world? But haven't our hips revolved, making it hard to do this? Wake up! Let's find out." Somewhere into my first cup of coffee, I decided that running on my knuckles in the forest at night is probably not something I'll want to do a lot of, yet I'm no less enthusiastic about the dream. To me it has to do with Uberation—the fact that Uberation may come from something as simple as a change in attitude or "posture," from being willing to try something else. To be Uberated is to be released into a new mobUity, aUowing a renewed understanding of one's world, of the kind of creatures that we are and have been and are capable of being. The dream helps me see that Uberation is not an escape from the past but a widening of temporal horizons, backward as well as forward. To run in the night like an animal! And then to go back into the mansion with the power of the night inside us. Liberation is the subject that interests many of the contributors in this issue. Over a year ago, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and the nations in the Soviet bloc undertook poUtical changes unprecedented in a time of peace. It has been apparent from the start that the shpping of the great symboUc faultUne of the BerUn WaU would be followed by fearful osculations, as the energy of change clashes with the obdurate past. Already there are rumblings of poUtical reactionism in Europe, as weU as scary clouds on our own horizon. Yet despite aU, the desire for freedom and poUtical transformation remain a widely thought about, widely felt desire. As we begin the countdown to a new miUennium—regardless of uncertainties—Uberation is in the air. Michael Glenny's "Escape into the Ocean" teUs the story of an oceanographer's escape to freedom from the pre-Gorbachev U.S.S.R., a real-life Cold War adventure as gripping as a John Le Carré novel. Selections from Yevgeny Yevtushenko's upcoming Fatal Half Measures covers the period from the 1945 Victory Day celebration in Red Square to the current day. In these diaristic essays, the great Russian poet expresses his beUef that the spirit of glasnost was not something created in a poUtical test tube—not as suddenly as we may imagine—but an attitude that has been nurtured by Russian artists and inteUectuals for over forty years. Charles GuseweUe's "The Year I Was Young" is a classic personal essay about another kind of Uberation, the year during which a young person learns through experience his own...

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