The turn of the fifteenth century was a period of cultural and political crisis, not only in Western Europe, but in Russia as well. The nations of both East and West were confronted with choices which were to determine their cultural and political history for the next few generations.

In Russia, the reigns of Ivan III (1462-1505) and Basil III (1505-1533) were particularly remarkable for the number and variety of issues the country had to face. In the political domain, it was the end of the process of the gathering of Russian lands by Moscow; socially, it was the first act in the breaking down of the position of the old Moscow boyar class. It was also a time of great cultural fermentation marked by a struggle between rigid traditionalism and a serious effort to introduce an esprit critique, into the intellectual life of Russia. In Russia—a country where intellectual activity was limited almost exclusively to the religious sphere—this cultural fermentation had its most important repercussions in the ecclesiastical domain.

When John Hay thus eulogized the economic progress the United States had seen under the leadership of the late President McKinley, the nation was, in fact, a debtor to European capital. Yet the farsighted statesman had interpreted correctly the world financial trend.

Between 1900 and 1914 foreign investments of the United States advanced from an estimated $700,000,000 to well over $1,000,000,-000. By 1920 American commercial investments—those in trading and industrial enterprises—in foreign countries amounted to nearly $4,000,000,000.

Gogol was little known in England before the Crimean War. Earlier there had been only one criticism of his works, and that an incompetent one (1841); a sketchy, erroneous mention of him in a table of Russian literature published in a periodical (1842); and the first translation of one of his supernatural tales, “Viy” (1847). Then the Crimean War brought forth a malicious forgery of his masterpiece of social satire, Dead Souls (1854), which occasioned three long articles, two of them exposing it for what it was, and a third simply exploiting it to suit the propaganda needs of the hour. On the more constructive side of the wartime interest in Gogol, first translations of two of his tales, with prefatory critical comments, were published in periodicals. Excepting a scattered handful of lost translations and one pioneering critical study, there was no further English interest in Gogol until the 1880s.

The Neuri (Neuroi) and Aesti of classical scholarship are the earliest names which recent research has attempted to gloss as Baltic (K. Būga's “Aestic”), but since nothing beyond conjecture, unsubstantiated by linguistic evidence, can establish the equation, it is better to begin more soberly with names about which there can be less doubt. The oldest known authority on these is Ptolemy (c. 100-78), who says in his De geographia “Ypo men tous Ouenedas, [Tacitus's Vencti, Wends, Slavs] Palin Galindai, [or Galindanoi, Calindians] kai Loudinoi, [or Loudênoi, Sudinians, Sudavians].” After a lapse of more than a millennium Peter von Dusburg (i.e., Duisburg) numbers these tribes among the Prussians, and two centuries later (1545), Meletius, archipresbyter Ecclesie Liccensis in Prussia, offers meager and obviously corrupt fragments of Sudavian or Yatvingian speech (e.g., moy ’,my,‘ cf. Pr. fem.