In 1861, in the second issue of his new journal Vremia, Dostoevsky published an article entitled “Mr. bov and the Question of Art.“ In it he attacks the utilitarian aesthetics of the radical literary critic N. A. Dobroliubov (1836-61); at the same time he sets forth the fundamentals of his own idealist aesthetic. Dostoevsky's article is his first major critique of the utilitarian and materialist outlook of the radical democrats led by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89) and Dobroliubov. It anticipates his later polemic with the radicals in Notes from theUnderground (1864). The problem of freedom, significantly, is in the foreground of both works. The insistence on freedom in artistic creation is the central motif of “Mr. Dobroliubov and the Question of Art.” It is to this problem that we wish to direct principal attention.

The Russian Old Believer and sectarian movement, as it appears in history, can be thought of, in anthropological terms, as a nativistic movement: that is, a movement of resistance to outside (in this case Western) cultural influence, and a reaffirmation and renewal of the native culture. In this sense, the movement comprised Old Believers, with or without priests, and an assemblage of sects of indigenous origin—Dukhobors, Subbotniki, Molokans, Skoptsy, and others. During the first period of its existence, the Old Believer and sectarian movement, besides being a nativistic movement, was at the same time a focus of resistance to the regime, as any form of religious dissidence must be under an essentially theocratic state.

From even before the time of Peter the Great, and down to the present day, Russia has had a tradition of active state participation in manufacturing and extractive industry. However, both the nature and extent of governmental activity has varied greatly in different periods. The purpose of this essay is to determine what place government policy during the twenty-one-year term of Count Egor Kankrin as minister of finance (1823-44) has in this long-standing “mercantilist” tradition. Both Kankrin and Nicholas I, who usually followed Kankrin's advice on economic policy, were unquestionably conservative in matters of political and social policy, but there is no necessary connection between the political views of Russian rulers and their attitude toward industrial development. Men as different in political outlook as Peter the Great, Witte, and Stalin all favored vigorous state action of one sort or another to promote industrial development, but none of them were political liberals.

Historians have differed in their evaluation of the nationality problem in the Habsburg Empire, but they have generally agreed that the Military Border maintained along the southern boundaries of Hungary and Croatia constituted a traditional element of dynastic strength. “There arose,” Oscar Jászi wrote, “a proverbial Habsburg patriotism, perhaps the only real one which the Habsburgs were capable of fomenting in their realm.“ The dissolution of the Military Border in Croatia-Slavonia, which took place soon after the celebrated Ausgleich of 1867, has been considered a serious blow to the military posture and the stability of the monarchy. Yet such appraisals need a critical reassessment. After the middle of the nineteenth century, South Slav national tendencies profoundly altered; and the Border became a blunted and much less “reliable” instrument of imperial policy.

The Stolypin Land Reform was a series of actions taken by the Russian Imperial government during the years 1905-17 to cope with the social and economic problems of the European Russian peasants. The basic part of any analysis of the Reform, therefore, should be a description of these actions as a coherent historical development in themselves. This essay presents such a description. The discussion is divided into four topics: general interpretation, the problems the Reform had to cope with, the general outline of its evolution, and the role of force in its execution. Related topics, such as the historical forces or events which produced the Reform, its results, or its significance in larger developments, are mentioned only incidentally.

The overwhelming ascendancy of the Iskra group (before the Bolshevik-Menshevik split) at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1903 has often been noted in the literature. Less attention has been given to Lenin's role in engineering this singular tour de force and to the tensions generated by the intrusion of his unique creed of action into the established patterns of the movement. No episode could be more revealing of the salient traits of Lenin's political personality.

Charges from Peking that Moscow no longer follows the true Leninist position on disarmament are probably among the reasons why Moscow is now publishing new documentary and interpretive material concerning Lenin's views on disarmament and other issues of war and peace. The new materials, coupled with other documents long available, make this an opportune time to review the development of Lenin's views on disarmament and their effect on Soviet policy during his lifetime.

Practically every single work of the young Dostoevsky may be interpreted as what Jules Janin called a parodie sérieuse. What the young Dostoevsky seems to be doing is essentially the following: He presents a romantic or sentimental theme, but with the characters and setting of the natural'naia shkola, and seeks to find a form that would fit such a synthesis. As a result, his heroes are “miscast,” that is, they have to play roles for which they are not fit. The timid, middle-aged, baldish Devushkin in Poor Folk is cast in the role of a sentimental lover; the thoroughly prosaic, “ordinary,” trivial Goliadkin in The Double develops a Doppelgänger complex; the semiliterate, brutish miser Prokharchin in the story “Mr. Prokharchin” comes to stand for the idea of supreme individualism—and so on.

The problem of the origin of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies in the 1905 Revolution is an important one in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement and the formative stages of the organs of the Soviet state. The problem is a complex one, involving both theory and practice—the conflicting theories of the revolution held by the various revolutionary parties in Russia in 1905 and the actions taken by their members both at the center and in local headquarters. Two revolutionary organizations are of paramount importance in this connection, the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).

Because the problem is directly related to major doctrinal controversies that broke out between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks after the 1905 Revolution, the historical record and its interpretation have been subject to powerful pressures.

Prior to World War II, Hungary had no written constitution. The Arany Bulla (Golden Bull) in 1222, the Pragmatica Sanctio in 1723, and the Compromise of 1867 were considered basic laws, because they regulated the relations between the king and the “nation” (i.e., the nobility) and contained certain safeguards against tyrannical (arbitrary) government. Before the Compromise, justice was administered by the local (county) government for all inhabitants without state-wide supervision, except for the serfs who were subject to their landlords. The Compromise of 1867, which created a constitutional dual monarchy for Austria and Hungary, was the outgrowth of the revolution of 1848. The immediate results of this revolution were the emancipation of the serfs and the establishment of the Ministry of Justice. Law No. IV of 1869 unified the judicial system nationally by removing judicial power from the jurisdiction of the counties.

Sometime in the decade between 1826 and 1836 Tiutchev wrote a poem entitled “Son na more” (“Dream at Sea”). A literal English translation would read as follows:

Both the sea and the storm rocked our skiff; Sleepy, I was abandoned to the full caprice of the waves. The two infinities were within me, And willfully they played with me. Around me, like cymbals, resounded the cliffs. The winds replied, and the waves sang. I flew deafened in a chaos of sounds. But above the chaos of sounds my dream was swiftly borne. Sickly bright, magically mute, It blew lightly over the sounding darkness. In the rays of my fever it unfolded its world: The earth shone green, the ether grew bright, Labyrinthine gardens, palaces, columns, And myriads of silent crowds seethed. I recognized many faces unfamiliar to me. I saw magic creatures, mysterious birds. Across the peaks of creation I strode like a god, And under me the world shone motionless. But through all the dreams, like the wail of a magician, I heard the roar of the ocean's abyss, And into the quiet domain of visions and dreams Burst the foam of the roaring waves.

Although, before the First World War, Slavic affairs received but little attention in the United States, libraries were in this respect somewhat ahead of the times and started building their collections at a relatively early juncture. It is true that in 1901 Herbert Putnam, then Librarian of Congress, found that the Library proper could count only 569 Russian and 97 Polish books among its own holdings. The Russian collection, he commented, “has few of the original authorities, and is weak in modern descriptive works. On the history of Russia and on the Crimean War [there are] only a few of the principal authorities.” Yet pursuant to an act of Congress passed in 1866, the Library held in deposit, though not in ownership, a more substantial if not very appreciable set of publications which had been received by the Smithsonian Institution in exchange for materials supplied to learned institutions in East and East Central Europe.

The use of foreign office materials for domestic history is by no means new, but Russian historians have done very little with this kind of research. One reason is that the Russians themselves have not needed to, and in recent years the turn toward social and intellectual history has seemed to make the diplomats' comments on court and society superficial if not irrelevant. This impression is actually erroneous, and non-Soviet scholars will find diplomatic archives a rich resource in themselves and an excellent supplement for published materials. This essay describes materials for Russian internal history from the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, the Archives du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, and the Public Record Office. The author read these archives for the period 1790-1812 looking for material on Russian reform policies to supplement information collected from published sources. The results were so gratifying that a summary of them should be of value to other scholars engaged on projects in prerevolutionary Russian domestic history.

Institutions can frequently play crucial roles in the political process. Rarely has this been more true than in Poland immediately after World War I, and rarely has a great political party made a more substantial mistake than did the Polish National Democrats and their allies in backing the establishment of proportional representation. It was largely because of this ill-fated electoral device that the Nationalist Right failed to win control of the first and second parliaments in renascent Poland. Coincidentally, no government based on the support of one reasonably homogeneous group could be formed until 1930, and then the conduct of the 1930 election rendered the results highly suspect.

Proportional representation was first employed in Poland in the elections to the Constituent Sejm of 1919. The electoral law was promulgated in November, 1918, by Premier Jędrzej Moraczewski, whose action then could only be described as reflecting full national consensus.

Almost any book on Lomonosov, and certainly any book or article about Lomonosov and the Russian language, is bound to quote this passage from the dedication to his Russian Grammar:

Charles V, the Roman Emperor, used to say that one should speak Spanish with God, French with friends, German with enemies, and Italian with the female sex. But if he had been skilled in Russian, he would, of course, have added that one could speak it with all of them, for he would have found in it the magnificence of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the delicacy of Italian, and in addition the richness and conciseness of Greek and Latin.... Cicero’s powerful eloquence, the splendid majesty of Virgil, Ovid’s pleasant oratory do not lose their merit in Russian.