Sologub is generally remembered, after his novel The Petty Demon, for the poetry of his middle period, the Symbolist era, but his last books of verse are his best, and they are of additional interest for their marked poetic conservatism compared with the earlier works. Sologub alone of the major Symbolists who stayed in the Soviet Union continued to mature in poetic ability and remained as productive as before 1917; unlike Blok, Belyj and Brjusov, he never accepted the revolution, and suffered no subsequent disillusionment. Sologub's verse was apparently little altered by the revolution and Soviet regime. Of the eight small books of verse which appeared between 1921 and 1923, most are on themes familiar from the prerevolutionary poetry; although two of the boks are on civic topics and contain revolutionary poems, most of the poems in them were written before 1917.

On January 21, 1920, a man named Ernst Barth stood up in Germany's Supreme Court at Leipzig to hear sentence passed upon him. The charge was “Attempted Treason”; the verdict, guilty; his punishment to be three years’ detention in a fortress. A tragic and now all but forgotten episode, the effort made to secure national rights for the Lusatian Sorbs at the Paris Peace Conference, had ended, in a German courtroom.

Tragic this episode surely was. In postwar years a small Slavic community in Germany found itself the object of bitter suspicion which had not existed before. “Die wendische Gefahr“—“The Wendish Danger“—found a place among the less felicitous journalistic cliches employed in the Weimar Republic. For more than a few Germans after 1918 the word “Wend” summoned up an image of treacherous men conspiring to tear yet another province from the prostrate Reich.

The year 1905 is an important landmark in the history of Czech nationalism and socialism. The generally held view of the events in 1905 as the social democratic struggle for universal suffrage is perhaps narrow and misleading. On closer examination the year 1905 appears a turning point in the nationalist struggle. Nationalism scored its greatest and last but one success: it broadened its mass basis with the organized working class.

The growth of nationalism within the socialist movement is on the whole acknowledged even by contemporary Czech historians; however, the changes that 1905 represented and brought about were either misunderstood or misinterpreted.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, who journeyed extensively during his lifetime and inserted many themes, sights, and sounds from abroad into his poetry, was a decidedly unsentimental traveller. Although at times he may have shed tears, they were not evoked by the same type of spectacle which would have activated the lachrymal glands of the illustrious Laurence Sterne, a man less acutely conscious of social injustice than Mayakovsky. Even before the Soviet poet commenced his actual travels he had been fascinated by foreign countries and had set forth the fancies which he wove about them in his poetry, notably in 150,000,000. The poems and prose sketches written as a direct result of his journeys abroad comprise perhaps one-tenth of his total literary output: the two twelve-volume editions of his work published in 1935-37 and in 1939-49 each reserved one volume for za granitsa.

One's usual sense of chronology and politics suggests that Russian poetry after 1917 was quite different from Russian poetry before 1917 and quite different from postwar European poetry. Perhaps the historians and politicians have again persuaded us into oversimplification, because Russian poetry did not change that way until the institutionalization of repression under industrial expansion in the late 1920's and early 1930's.

That Brjusov early became a Communist Party member was politically exiting to his friends, important for the Party, but not artistically significant. Like any “change,” it followed not from the character of the new but from the failure of the old, in this instance, from Brjusov's creative attrition. Brjusov did not so much become a member of the Party as he stopped being a non-member, much in the sense that he stopped being a Symbolist when the social principles and patterns which tolerated the esthetic values associated with Symbolism altered and, in alteration, required fresh satisfaction and different values.

Modern readers and critics of Konrad Wallenrod have long been perplexed over the nature of the poem as an artistic entity, and over its essential meaning and possible allegorical significance. More than this, critics have encountered great difficulty in attempting to relate the poem to Mickiewicz' artistic, moral and political development. For example, those who read the poem strictly in ethico-political terms have become much exercized over the problem of its alleged immorality and have encountered great difficulty in relating this work to the development of Mickiewicz' political ideas and attitudes. For the literary historian, the problem of explaining why this work differs so radically from the other poetry written during the first two years of Mickiewicz' Russian exile remains the single most important issue.

In 1959 the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism in literature became a quarter of a century old. And yet, despite this rather venerable age for a literary “school,” its aims and methods are almost as vague as they were at its birth, at the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in 1934. This in spite of the fact that the official artistic credo of Soviet belles lettres exhibits the same passion for quasi-scientific definitions and statistical devices as do the periodically forthcoming definitions of the current implications of Party policy, united as they are by the insistence that the “science” of Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action.

The physical book of this century has been described as “a degenerate weakling, bent on self destruction.” In this world of “Lweaklings” Soviet publications are especially prone to self destruction, and it is a matter of serious concern to those librarians and scholars who work with the decaying books, periodicals and newspapers which record the facts, figures and ideas of Russian and Soviet civilization.

In 1957 William J. Barrow, a Richmond, Virginia, expert on paper, began a study of the deterioration of American book papers with funds granted by the Council on Library Resources, Inc., of Washington, D. C. He found that “most library books printed in the first half of the twentieth century will be in an unusable condition in the next century.” The materials upon which this verdict was based were 500 non-fiction books printed and published in the United States between 1900 and 1949.