A scientific session of the Division of General Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences was held on May 14, 1997 at the P L Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, RAS. The following reports were presented at the session: (1) Mineev V P, Vavilov M G (Landau Institute of Theoretical Physics, RAS, Chernogolovka, Moscow Region) ’’De Haas-van Alphen effect in superconductors’’; (2) Volkov V A, Takhtamirov E E (Institute of Radio-Engineering and Electronics, RAS, Moscow) ’’Dynamics of an electron with space-dependent mass and the effective-mass method for semiconductor heterostructures’’; (3) Sukhorukov A P (M V Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow) ’’New avenue of investigation in the physics of solitons: parametrically-coupled solitons in a quadratically-nonlinear medium’’; (4) Bogatov A P (P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) ’’Optics of semiconductor lasers’’; (5) Korovin S D (Institute of High-Power Electronics, Tomsk) ’’Generation of high-power microwave radiation on the base of high-current nanosecond electron beams’’; (6) Ardelyan N V, Bisnovatyi-Kogan G S, Moiseenko S G (M V Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow; Institute of Space Research, Moscow) ’’Explosion mechanisms of supernovae: the magnetorotational model’’; (7) Slysh V I (Astrocosmic Centre of the P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) ’’Stars, planets, and cosmic masers’’. Summaries of four (1, 2, 6, 7) of the reports are given below.