Constantinople—“the Imperial City” (Tsargrad), as the Russians used to call it—with its riches and splendor, its churches and palaces, fired the imagination of many a “Barbaric people of the North,” and following in the wake of the Huns, the Avars, and the Bulgars, the Russians in their turn were eventually attracted by her. Out of their wars and commerce with the Byzantines there gradually developed a deeper cultural intercourse between the two nations, and it is the Byzantine form of Christianity which became the foundation of the Russian Church.

The first Russian attack on Constantinople took place in 860. Both the fact itself and the date are firmly established by evidence available in which Patriarch Photius's two homilies occupy a prominent place.

The kolkhozy are rural associations based on the principles of coöperative management, public ownership of the principal means of production, collective labor, annual planning of production, and remuneration for labor based upon the socialist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” They are now in the second phase of their development. During the first phase, which ended approximately in 1939-40, the Soviet authorities were concerned primarily with grouping individual peasants into coöperative enterprises. Eighteen and a half million peasant families were united into 242,000 agricultural coöperatives (artels) comprising a total of 488,000,000 hectares (1,205,000,000 acres) of land.

The 1860s ushered a new era into Imperial Russia. In the Baltic Provinces, however, the development of capital and industry by far surpassed the progress made in Russia proper. Among the Lettish people, three major sociological trends can be said to have begun about this time. These were (1) the rising from the peasantry of a rural bourgeoisie; (2) the flow of peasants into the cities and their consequent forming into a Lettish urban bourgeoisie and a Lettish urban proletariat; and (3) a cultural and national awakening which, based on almost universal literacy, spread rapidly among the masses.

The cultural awakening was pioneered by a group of Lettish intellectuals among whom were men of letters, such as Christian Valdemar, Andreis Spagis, and K. Baron.

John Wilson, when middle-aged, once set out his achievements for De Quincey to consider. “In The City of the Plague,” he wrote, “there ought to be something of the sublime. Is there?” Modern critics have not thought so: Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, while not stinting praise for the mature Wilson, the “Christopher North” who was the mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine and virtual creator of the Noctes Ambrosianae, dismiss the poetry of his early career as imitative and unimportant. His “poems, The Isle of Palms (1812) and The City of the Plague (1816), merely show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets.” The City of the Plague, as Wilson first conceived it, was to be “awful and wild, solemn.”

A. A. Ždanov's reference to the Serapion Brothers in his famous 1946 speech recalls a lively chapter in the early history of Soviet literature. Mikhail Zoščenko, who bore the brunt of Ždanov's attack, and the poet Tikhonov, who got off with a scolding and the loss of his position as president of the Union of Soviet Writers, were both among the twelve young writers who formed the Serapion Brotherhood in 1921.

They were a remarkable group. When their first meeting was held on February 1, 1921, all but one of their number were under the age of thirty, and three were not yet out of their teens. One of the youngest was their unofficial leader, Lev Lunc, whose death in 1924, just one week after his twenty-third birthday, cut short the career of the man whom Gor'kij considered to be the most promising dramatist in Russia.