D URING THAT HEADY PERIOD now known to history as the Gorbachev years, a scholarly section was set up within the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences under the curious title of Post-Classical Studies. It enjoyed support in those reformist government circles appalled at the possibility that Russian state-sponsored culture, once it was opened up to the West, would reveal itself as pinched, naive, crippled by the accumulated silliness of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and desperately out of date. A group of very smart young researchers were recruited to staff the Laboratory, and granted ready access to the canonical texts and reigning gurus of today's literary-critical scene. This group included a prolific philosopher of culture from the Institute, Mikhail Kuzmich Ryklin (born 1948, Ph.D., 1978). Commanding French, English, and German, Ryklin translated into Russian major works and essays by Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, Gadamer, Adorno, and the Marquis de Sade; he had already made Frazer's Golden Bough available in Russian, and he answered for the entries on Blanchot, Bataille, and Tel Quel in the Dictionary of Contemporary Philosophy published in Moscow in 1990. But Ryklin was more than a conduit through which the luminaries of continental thought could reach the newly liberated and vulnerable East. He has also served as an energetic conference organizer and commentator, integrating our latest literary categories into the current exSoviet scene, now in the velvet grip of poststructuralist postcommunism. In 1989 Ryklin participated in bringing Jacques Derrida to Moscow; in the same year the Laboratory launched a seminarand-publication project entitled Avant-garde and Marginal Philosophies-to be sure, not marginal for long. Ryklin's recent and forthcoming publications include such familiar verbal clusters as: Power and Soviet Discourse, Sex and Discourse: Foucault's Antirepressive Hypothesis, The Schizoanalysis of Culture, Power and the Politics of Literature, and without Literature (this last essay in a 1990 volume entitled Alternative Russian Poetics).