Serious scholarly study of the imperial Russian civil service is almost entirely the product of the past decade, and although several important works have appeared, virtually no quantitative material on the social characteristics of the bureaucracy is available. The imperial government did not publish and probably did not compile statistics on such matters as the social origin, wealth, religion, or education of its civil employees, but the raw data for a partial compilation are available in personnel records (formuliarnie spiski) of individual officials, which are preserved in the Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad.

“Homme de toute sorte de savoir,” was how Alexander Turgenev was once described by Chateaubriand, while Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, in a letter to Sydney Smith, called him “a Russian gentleman accomplished in all liberal and orthodox sciences.” The word “orthodox” was underlined by Jeffrey, and Turgenev said that he did not understand the meaning of that underlining. It is possible, of course, that all Jeffrey had in mind was that Turgenev was of the Russian Orthodox faith and knew all about its tenets.

Tolstoy the man, whose awe-inspiring personality haunts us still, poses an enormous obstacle to those who wish to write about his work. One frequently encounters interpretations of the novels, plays, and short stories based on Tolstoy's aims in creating them and on what his consciously held values were or are believed to have been. Unfortunately for anyone who attempts this kind of evaluation, Tolstoy, one of the most complex and baffling men who ever lived, is notorious for his self-contradictions. Although we have some good biographies, Tolstoy deserves the attention of a scholar—probably not a literary critic—with a sophisticated view of human personality and the relationship between the individual and society, who will write an analytical account of his problems comparable to Erik Erikson's widely admired Young Man Luther.

Late in October 1918, in the shadow of impending defeat, nationalist revolutions rocked the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time the Austro-Hungarian representatives signed the Padua Armistice on November 3, imperial authority no longer existed in the Dual Monarchy. In Hungary the revolution of October 30 brought to power a coalition government led by the liberal pacifist, Mihaly Karolyi. The coalition included the Karolyi-led Independence Party, the Social Democrats, and the Radicals of Oszkar Jaszi. This revolutionary government's aim was to liquidate the semifeudal remnants of the old order by introducing democratic, political, and social reforms.