Russian peasants do not appear to welcome children with particular enthusiasm, but once a child is born it is protected to the greatest possible extent from hunger and cold, often at the cost of considerable parental sacrifice. The infant and young child is fed by its mother generously and frequently, and for a very long period, often up to two years; if the mother is absent, a crying baby is given a comforter made of chewed and sweetened bread tied up in a rag by the person looking after it, typically a woman of a generation older than the parents—a babuška—though sometimes its older brothers and sisters have this duty.

Any analysis of European economy in the seventeenth century must inevitably take into account the wide prevalence and frequency of war. War was the norm in Europe of that century, and the years in which the continent saw no wars numbered less than a decade. While Western Europe in the latter part of the century repeatedly mobilized and fought to forestall the designs of Louis XIV, Eastern Europe found itself no less frequently shaken by devastating wars which at one time or another taxed the resources of the German Emperor, Sweden, Poland, Turkey and Russia. The ascending scale of warfare and the increasing size of armies weighed heavily on European economy, and particularly so on the Russian state, whose Treasury could ill afford large military enterprises.

The manuscript of Gumilëv's verse play, The Poisoned Tunic, now in the possession of Professor Gleb Struve, was presented to him by Boris Anrep, mosaic artist and one-time contributor to the well-known Russian literary and art magazine Apollon, together with a number of papers, notebooks, and other belongings of the late Nikolaj Gumilëv. Gumilëv left these things with Anrep in London before his return to Russia in 1918.

In 1917 Gumilëv, then an officer of the Aleksandrijskij Hussar Regiment, had been sent to Paris for later assignment to the Salonika front. He was detained in Paris from the summer of 1917 to January, 1918, at which time he went to London, where he wanted to join the British Army in the hope of being sent to Mesopotamia. He stayed in England until April and saw Anrep frequently before returning to Russia.

In a society whose leadership demands that all man's life and works be brought within the compass of a single Weltanschauung one would expect considerable attention to be devoted to the problem of art and its position in the social complex, for art, and in particular literature, is one of the most direct and effective means for influencing the political, social, and philosophical ideas and attitudes of the mass of individuals of which the society is composed. In post-revolutionary Russia the role art was to play in a society based on Marxian socialism at once became the subject of intense discussion, but fifteen years were to elapse before any final “official” solution of the problem was reached. It was not until 1932 that the formula of “socialist realism” received the endorsement of State and Party, whereupon its principles became incumbent upon the members of the various unions of writers, artists, and composers.

The term Belorussia is not well known outside the Slavic world. The area is more frequently referred to as "White Russia." Since 1917, however, use of the latter term has become a source of confusion. The Russians who fought against the Reds in the Civil War of 1918-20 were also called "White Russians." Although in Russian the term Belorussy, the ethnic group, and Belye Russkie, the political group, are easily distinguishable, there is no way of making the distinction clear in literal translation into English. Many people still cannot understand how an anti-Soviet group succeeded in organizing a republic within the Soviet Union, and why its members are called "white" after they have turned "red." In view of the general confusion, it is perhaps time to suggest that when referring to the ethnic group, the term Belorussian replace the term "White Russian" in our libraries, documents and literature.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Hungarian literature, an era of optical illusions and wasted lives, the works of Kálmán Mikszáth represented an outlet for socially significant, humorous and satirical energies. Mikszáth was not only accepted, but acclaimed by the Hungarian ruling classes. In their estimation no apparent damage had been done to their social status by his novels, stories and sketches. Although he saw how badly things were going, and though his level-headed judgement was immune to self-deception, he identified himself with his own social stratum, which was that of the gentry. Richard Chase's criterion of “ordealist criticism,” that is, “being interested in the suffering and failure of the artist and his estrangement from society,” could not be applied to the life and works of the Hungarian humorist, although it would be applicable to several of his contemporaries. Mikszáth was not an “accursed” creator or a spiritual exile.