Napoleon Bonaparte used a variety of means of appealing to the Russians When he needed them, as he often did. He asked Alexander I for an interview before the battle of Austerlitz, a request which Alexander must later have regretted turning down. He marched to Friedland and Tilsit for the inauguration of the Grand Empire two years later. And in 1812 he pursued them all the way to Moscow, only to be eluded.

But the occasion of his earliest overtures to the Russians, the rapprochement with Tsar Paul during the winter of 1800-1801—an arrangement in which Albert Sorel found all the “grands projet et les grandes rȇveries” of Tilsit—though often remarked, has remained little understood. The Russians had withdrawn from the Second Coalition, but they had not reestablished diplomatic relations with France.

Alexander Herzen's most influential writings were the columns in the journals he edited during his exile in London in the 1850s and 1860s, Poliarnaia Zvezdaand Kolokol, which played so distinct a part in inducing members of the Russian government to prepare the emancipation of 48,000,000 serfs and the other “Great Reforms” and in persuading so much of literate Russian society to accept them. By common consent, Herzen's autobiography, My Past and Thoughts,was his great contribution to the literature of Russia and the world. Only after these does one mention his sequence of essays on the revolutions of 1848, From the Other Shore.

In a recent review of Wasiolek’s work on Dostoevski’s major writings Joseph Frank criticized the idea of moral ambiguity as “unquestionably the most dubious“ in the book. Although he regards the idea as useful and relevant, Frank feels that Wasiolek makes the “ambiguity more radical than it really is.” What is this concept and how radical is it in Dostoevski’s work?

The notion is a more subtle and far-reaching version of the common view that things are not necessarily what they seem to be. It says that situations and actions are in themselves neutral and meaningless; any value or meaning is imposed by us. Expressed thus, moral ambiguity seems a rarefied concept, but in Dostoevski’s hands it becomes a vivid, if still confusing, reality. It is best illustrated at first by specific and limited incidents.

Soviet discussions of what is meant by “socialist in content, national in form” in literature invariably approach the second half of the slogan by saying, “First of all, of course, the language” a work is created in. Beyond this point there is often less agreement, but there is no questioning the validity of having a person who writes in Chechen called a “Chechen writer.” Biographical notes on Soviet writers generally follow such an identifying procedure, except in apparently touchy cases, like that of Wanda Wasilewska, whose description consistently reads: “Soviet writer. Writes in Polish.” No such problems beset writers working in most of the other “languages of the peoples of the USSR.” The second edition of the Bol'shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (BSE; 1949-58) everywhere uses national qualifiers on the order of: Panch—“Ukrainian Soviet writer“; Aibek —“Soviet Uzbek writer“; and Gafurov—“Lak Soviet poet.“

In his article “Kaufman of Turkestan: An Assessment of His Administration, 1867-1881” in the Slavic Review (June 1967, pages 265-85) Professor David Mac- Kenzie appears to have been unduly sensitive to any critical contemporary comment concerning General Kaufman. In his protective zeal he has sought to undermine the reputation of Eugene Schuyler, one of the most capable American diplomats of that period, whose diplomatic and literary careers were distinguished by perceptive and candid reporting.

Nothing in Eugene Schuyler's writings justifies the generous use of depreciatory language in Professor MacKenzie's article. To claim that Schuyler was “unfair or malicious,” “misrepresented” Kaufman's work, and presented a “distorted picture“ of his regime is unwarranted by the record.