1 The Russian translation is said to be “from Moldavian.” In fact there is no such language. A Rumanian may speak of himself as being a Moldavian, Walachian, or Oltean in the same sense as an American will say that he is a Virginian, Californian, or Iowan, and a Russian that he is Siberian or Muscovite. But there are no languages, not even distinct dialects, which correspond to these geographical terms. The Soviets do, however, for obvious political reasons, attempt to maintain the fiction that there is a linguistic distinction between Rumanian and the so-called Moldavian. Actually, Haşdeu spent all his creative life, and wrote the above-mentioned book, in Bucharest, that is in Walachia, and it is there that the two editions of this work which appeared during his lifetime were published in 1865 and 1894.

2 See, e.g., where the title of the book is given as When writing in French and German, Rumanian historians use the adjectives le terrible and der schreckliche respectively as equivalents of cel cumplit, and English-speaking historians write about John the Terrible. The title vodais an adaptation of the Russian (or, rather, Ukrainian and Polish) voevoda, except that in Slavic languages it designates mainly the military leader (field commander) while in Rumanian it means more generally the leader of the country. Contemporary kings of Rumania have often been referred to as voda.

3 For instance, the Mechnikov family was originally Spadarenko—the Rumanian spada (sword) was translated into the Russian mech—and the famous geographer Lev Il'ich Mechnikov (1838-88) attempted once, when in his teens, an adventurous escape to Moldavia to reclaim the princely throne to which, according to family tradition, he allegedly had a right.

4 The Russian occupation of the Danubian Principalities followed the Peace of Adrianople (1829). The Russians even toyed with the idea of incorporating the Principalities into the Empire but gave up the plan to avoid major diplomatic complications.

5 The so-called constitution which General Dondukov-Korsakov, sometimes referred to as “the Kiselev of Bulgaria,” gave the Bulgarians in 1878 was closely modeled after Kiselev's Organic Regulament. In fact, it, too, was officially so called by the Russians. It was by no means a liberal document even if some of Alexander II's subjects may have been justified in envying the Bulgarians for having received at least so much.

6 On the competition between the Russian and French cultural influences in the Rumanian Principalities, and the displacement of the former by the latter, see Iorga, N., Histoire des Élats Balcaniques jusqu'a 1924 (Paris: J. Gambler, 1925), chap. xvii.Google Scholar

7 The Greeks adopted exceptionally liberal constitutions (in 1821, 1823, and 1827) and the conservative regime they had to accept, in 1830, when declared independent, was forced upon them by the Great Powers. See Aristovoulos J. Manessis, Deux États Neés en 1830: Ressemblances et Dissemblances Constitutionnelles entre la Belgique et la Grèce (Brussels: Maison Ferdinand Larcier, 1959). There are many interesting parallels, contrasts, and interconnections between the developments in Greece and Rumania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Greek national movement was, too, at one time pro-Russian. (Cf. Iorga, op. cit., chap, x.) But due to geopolitical and cultural factors it developed faster than the Rumanian one and became both democratic and anti-Russian half a century earlier. The last pro-Russian Greek statesman was Count Capo d'Istria and he was assassinated, in 1831, precisely because he was too conservative.

8 The Russian-Rumanian relations of this period have recently been treated in great detail on the basis of Russian documents in Jelavich, Barbara, Russia and the Rumanian National Cause: 1858-1859 (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1959).Google Scholar

9 For Haşdeu's publicistic writings see Bogdan Petriceicu-Haşdeu, Scrieri Literare, Morale si Politice, ed. Mircea Eliade (2 vols.; Bucharest: Fundaţia “Regele Carol II,“ 1937). The second volume contains articles, open letters, and other polemical material.

10 Cf. D. Murăraşu, Naţionatismul lui Eminescu (Madrid: Editura “Carpaţii,” 1955), p. 74.

11 Cf. ibid., p. 71.

12 Haşdeu does not use the term “class” and he is not speaking of social classes in the Marxian sense. He, like Eminescu and other fervent nationalists, thinks of the Rumanian nation as a unit. “Super-imposed” are foreigners or denationalized Rumanians: the dichotomy is not between social classes belonging to the same nation but between ethnic groups which occupy different social positions. Haşdeu promotes a “nationalism of the fourth estate,” that is, a nationalism which benefits and expresses the values of the peasantry, not the bourgeoisie. M. Dragomanov, writing during the same years about the Ukrainians, pointed out that in certain East European countries nations and classes coincide, hence national and class liberation movements coincide, too.

13 See Pamfil Şeicaru, Nicolae Iorga (Colecţia “Carpatii,” No. 7; Madrid: Editura “Carpaţii,” 1957), p. 20.

14 Haşdeu's linguistic versatility permitted him to draw on a variety of historical material. He was one of the few Rumanian historians to consult not only Western and Russian but also Polish sources.

15 All page numbers refer to the above-mentioned Soviet edition.

16 B. Petriceicu-Haşdeu, Ion-Voda Cel Cumplit (2nd ed.; Bucharest: Editura Librăriei Carol Müller, 1894).

17 See, for instance, A.-D. Xenopol, Histoire des Roumains de la Dacie Trajane (3 vols.; Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1896), especially I, 332-33.

18 Ion was an illegitimate son of Stephen the Young, a grandson of Stephen the Great (1457-1504). His mother was an Armenian girl, and for that reason he was sometimes called John the Armenian.

19 Ion spent some time in Poland when, during the reign of Sigismond Augustus, the last of the Yagailo dynasty, a wave of Protestant influence swept the country.

20 The rulers of Moldavia and Walachia were named and deposed at the whim of the Ottoman sultans. Money payments were involved as under the iarlyk and dan system of the Russian Mongol period. To give a patriotic explanation to various “deals” and moral “compromises” in which some national heroes indulged, Rumanian historians often bent over backwards as did the Russian chroniclers when they praised as glorious the reign of, for instance, Alexander Nevskii.

21 Haşdeu lists all the important reforms introduced by Ion during his brief reign and notes (p. 37) that “all this was achieved by Ion Voda without the help of a ‘legislative chamber': legislative chambers do not make a 2nd of May.” (Haşdeu alludes here to the coup d'état of May 2, 1864, when Alexander Cuza, the first ruler of the United Rumanian Principalities, disbanded the conservative legislative chambers and introduced by decree certain reforms to which the boyars were opposed.)

22 XXXVI, No. 18 (December, 1959), 50, 54. Incidentally, the critics of Stalin are able to support their views by quoting what Stalin himself said in 1933: “The times have passed when leaders were regarded as the only makers of history, while the workers and peasants were not taken into account. The destinies of nations and of states are now determined not only by leaders, but primarily and mainly by the vast masses of the working people.” “Speech Delivered at the First All-Union Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Brigades, Feb. 19, 1933,” Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), XIII, 262-63.

23 NO. 4, 1954, p. 148 (emphasis added).