The Arts of Bulgaria since World War II are of considerable interest for the history of art largely because they so directly demonstrate what happens to the arts of a previously non-Communist country under Soviet dominance. Since the Communist take-over, not only has Bulgarian art directly reflected the Soviet political line but it has done this even more thoroughly than the art of the Soviet Union itself. For beautiful Bulgaria is such a compact and homogeneous little country—about 325 miles long and 215 miles wide, with a population of only 8 million people, about 90 percent of whom are of specifically Bulgarian stock—that its Communist government can control the arts with far greater ease than can the regime of so enormous and racially diversified a nation as the Soviet Union. Even long before World War II, Slavic Bulgaria had closer cultural links with Slavic Russia than did any of the other countries that fell under Soviet political domination as a consequence of the war. As might therefore have been expected, its arts have reflected the influence of the Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”—and the distinct but related and highly relevant Stalinist formula of an art “national in form and socialist in content”—more directly than have those of the other “satellites.”

Afanasii Fet was a poet profoundly interested in philosophy, and yet it seemed to some that his verse lacked depth of thought; a realistic and very practical man, he wrote poems remote from the concerns of daily life, immersed in the ephemeral world of nightingales and roses. The key to this apparent contradiction is the concept of beauty that is central to the work of Fet and that enables him to maintain a consistent outlook on life and on art. Fet himself described this outlook as follows: “As poetry itself is the re-creation not of the whole subject but only of its beauty, so poetic thought is only a reflection of philosophical thought, and again it is a reflection of its beauty; its other aspects are of no concern to poetry.” In other words, an artist may take into account the “whole subject” in his practical concerns and strive to comprehend all facets of philosophy in his intellectual endeavors, but his art fulfills itself only in speaking of the beautiful.

Little study has been devoted to the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity. While some attention has been paid to the Crypto-Christians of Asia Minor, who were numerous, lived in groups, and endured a long time, the Crypto-Christians of the Balkans have been largely neglected, with the exception of an occasional work referring to only a single nationality, particularly the Greeks.

The Russian Revolution has not yet achieved the status of the French Revolution as an academic preserve for battalions of professional historians, but few are likely to deny that its impact on the twentieth century is already more profound than that of the French upheaval on the nineteenth. The fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution is now upon us, and it is a melancholy commentary on the uncertain intellectual climate of the Soviet Union that despite lavish funds, abundant trained personnel, and access to archives and primary sources unavailable in the West, Soviet historians have failed to produce a work of permanent importance on this crucial episode of modern Russian history. Yet the stifling orthodoxy of Stalinism has given way to the uncertain but relative freedom under his successors, and the auguries point to a further mellowing of the party line as Soviet society haltingly approaches the educational and living standards of the Western world.

On July 11, 1867, an imperial decree established the governor-generalship of Turkestan, inaugurating a significant experiment in Russian administration of Central Asia. On July 14 General Konstantin Petrovich fon-Kaufman (1818-82) was appointed Turkestan’s first governor general. During the next fourteen years he rooted Russian colonial rule so firmly that subsequent incompetent governors could not overturn it. He began Turkestan’s modernization, but his regime aroused intense controversy in Russia. Colleagues eulogized Kaufman as a talented organizer who won the loyalty and respect of both Russians and natives. Numerous critics, led by General M. G. Cherniaev, his successor (1882-84), castigated his administration. Kaufman’s work was misrepresented by Eugene Schuyler, an American diplomat. Soviet historians either vilified him as an instrument of tsarist imperialism or relegated him to obscurity.

Editor’s Note: In his covering letter for the following piece Mr. Hollander remarked that “sociologists rarely make themselves heard on the pages of the Slavic Review” and expressed the hope that other readers will also be “inclined to join the debate.” We should like to take the opportunity thus provided to invite all sociologists to raise their voices in our pages. We also join the author in his hope that others will enter the debate.

Though vigorously pursued since the turn of the century, Western studies of the Renaissance, including those in this country, have not hitherto encompassed eastern Europe. Therefore, the appearance of the first comprehensive assessment of Slavic literatures of the period, by I. N. Golenishchev-Kutuzov (Ital’ianskoe Vozrozhdenie i slavianskie literatury XV-XVI vekov, Moscow, 1963), should be welcomed by Slavicists and by students of the Renaissance and the Reformation as an event of considerable significance.