During the quarter century from 1803 to 1828, the Russian imperial government followed an educational policy which ranged from practical to classical, democratic to class-oriented, progressive to conservative. The decrees, rescripts, and regulations may have been contradictory, but they are simply pieces of a puzzle which, in the end, provide the outline of a rather clear picture. This picture, as we shall see in more detail later, shows a movement, in the most elementary terms, from functional to classical, from open to restricted, from modern to traditional. In all respects, the law of 1828 opposed those of 1803 and 1804, but the line of march between the two points was straight and constant.

Another puzzle, however, is more difficult to solve: why did Russian educational policy follow this particular trend ? Among the possible solutions to this question, the activities of Count Joseph Marie de Maistre deserve more study. Maistre is remembered today as a theocratic political philosopher with an eloquent pen, but during his term in Russia (1803-17), as the diplomatic representative of the Sardinian king, he deeply involved himself in the internal questions facing the Russian government. Education particularly interested Maistre, and he turned his attention to this topic from June of 1810 until the end of the following year. During this eighteen-month period, he wrote four works dealing with the question of education in Russia, hoping to influence policy and bring about specific changes.

The Bolshevik Revolution had little immediate effect on the periodicals, news-papers, and publishing houses that were already in existence in 1917. During the first few months after the takeover, Communist Party papers appeared along with satirical journals, such as The Scourge (Bich) and The New Satyricon (Novyi satirikon), that remained steadfastly opposed to the new regime. Then, in the middle of 1918, the government ordered the closing of all opposition news-papers and magazines, and authors suddenly discovered that the places where they could publish were limited. The civil war brought further hardships; shortages of food and firewood plagued everyone in the cities, but writers also suffered from the paper shortage that made publishing virtually impossible.

Despite the harsh material conditions of the next several years, a vigorous cultural life endured in Petrograd, thanks in no small part to a number of organizations that aided artists, musicians, writers, and scholars.

When “Bezhin Meadow” first appeared in Sovremennik in 1851, Turgenev’s friend Feoktistov wrote to him that while the story had “produced an enormous effect on the public in Moscow,” he found it lacked a “general impression,” a “general thread,” that would unify its fragmentary parts and give the reader a clue to its general significance. Well might Feoktistov have been puzzled, for the censor had omitted the story’s ending! The ending was soon available to the reader in the edition of A Hunter’s Notes published in Moscow in 1852: “With sorrow I must add that Pavel died before the year was out. He was not drowned, but killed by a fall from a horse. A pity, he was a splendid lad !“ While indicating a “general thread,” the theme of mortality, the lines produce what may at first appear to be a facile irony.

In recent years, Soviet officials and scholars have expressed increasing concern about the "lack of discipline" among industrial workers in the USSR. Labor productivity remains low, and it is improving at an unacceptably slow pace. At the same time, "shirking," "idling," on-the-job drunkenness, and industrial accidents are widespread. But the most troublesome manifestation of the Soviet worker's lack of discipline is the high rate of labor turnover.

It is customary in Soviet criticism of Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin (1873–1954) to speak of the unique blend of fact and fantasy, of science and art in his work. In fact, this view is not restricted to Soviet discussions of the writer’s art. It is a reasonable view, if cautiously considered as no more than a convenient generality. Something of the same generalizing nature operates in discussions of the literary forms which Prishvin most often employed in his narrative art: the ocherk, the rasskaz, and, less frequently, the povestf. Scholars and critics speak of the writer’s inimitable mastery of these forms, but rarely in definitive terms. Briefly summarized, Prishvin’s preferred forms are the halfsketch and half-tale, or the novelette-sketch; his pieces represent an amalgam of fact and fiction. They are, above all, lyrical and poetic, but they are also “scientific.” They are the one and the other, but their specificity seems almost too elusive to capture and define.

The woman question, which produced some of the best polemical writing of the nineteenth century, was an international phenomenon. In the 1850s, in Europe, essays on different sides of the question were written, published, translated, paraphrased, or reacted to, all in short order. Russia soon joined in the debate. The woman question, under different names, had existed previously in Russia, especially during the 1830s when some of the fiction published revealed women as victims of society. But, in the post-Crimean War period, what had been part of a more general preoccupation of Russian liberals, a striving toward general enlightenment, gave rise to a new civic sense of women's role in the general betterment of society and a debate on the education that would be necessary to fulfill that role.

The Revolution of 1905 challenged the symbolists’ belief that they could seclude themselves from the rest of society. Forced to reexamine their previous ideas, values, and attitudes, they developed new ideologies that took cognizance of the current crisis. Among the most prominent of the new ideologies was mystical anarchism, the doctrine of the symbolist writers Georgii Chulkov and Viacheslav Ivanov. Particularly attractive to the symbolists, mystical anarchism also influenced other artists and intellectuals; doctrines similar to it proliferated, and it engendered a polemic in which almost all the symbolists took part. Strikingly similar to the mystical anarchism of other periods of social upheaval, both in Russia and in the West, illuminating a facet of the little-known mystical and religious aspects of the Revolution of 1905, and providing an example of the response of apolitical writers and artists to revolutionary upheaval, Chulkov and Ivanov’s doctrine merits closer study than it has so far received.

Lenin's crucial role in formulating and laying the foundations of Soviet nationality policy is acknowledged by all. His nationality program—whether one views it as opportunist and pseudo-Marxist or as “the outstanding contribution to the treasure trove of creative Marxism”—is considered to be his most original and perhaps most successful policy. Lenin's lasting impact on the nationalities themselves is attested by the fact that national dissidents in the Soviet Union often call for a return to “Leninist” policy. One dissident writes, “It is difficult to find today anything more useful, noble and imperative than the restoration of Lenin's nationalities policy.”

According to most biographers, Lenin became involved with the nationality question only on the eve of World War I while living in exile in the multinational Austrian Empire. It was there that he recognized nationalism as a powerful force and began to devise a program that would harness it for the revolution. Opposing both the cultural autonomy scheme of the Austrian Marxists and the total scorn of nationalism by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, in debates with fellow Marxists, formulated his own program.

The late Allan M. Cartter was chancellor and executive vice-president of New York University from 1966 through 1972 and then professor in the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and director of its Laboratory for Research on Higher Education. An economist, he devoted the last fifteen years of his short but brilliant life to predicting academic trends, a subject which economists and educational administrators, until recently, have both neglected or mishandled, to our great misfortune.

This book, his last and most important, is one of a series sponsored by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. It does not mention Slavic studies or any problems peculiar to them. Moreover, every field of study differs in some ways from every other: Russian and East European studies, for example, constitute a relatively new field, with a faculty corps which will have especially large retirements in the 1980s because of the way it blossomed after World War II.

The stated purpose of the encyclopedia being reviewed here, Marxism, Communism and Western Society: A Comparative Encyclopedia is to present a comprehensive comparative portrait of two worlds, one called “Communism,“ the other, “Western Society,” including their institutions and self-images, the images they have of each other, and their entire views of the cosmos; the range of topics covered is extremely wide. Several aims might be fulfilled by such a work. One of them is to serve as a reference book for students of Marxism and Communist societies, especially the Soviet Union, and not for specialists only but also for anyone interested in selected aspects of these topics. On the whole, the Encyclopedia serves this purpose very well. The relevant articles tend to be competent and thorough, even though I can understand why one of the anonymous referees of this essay found them “tinged with Germanic pedantry, dry and often verbose, with a penchant for abstraction, reifications, and fine distinctions.“

Little attention has been paid in Yugoslav historiography to the relationship between social structure and the character of the national movements of the various Yugoslav peoples. Enough data are available, however, to compile a list of the problems that should be studied in any systematic comparison of these national movements. The purpose of this paper is to examine some aspects of the interaction of social structures and national movements among the Yugoslav peoples for the twenty-year period before the First World War. The paper is primarily focused on urban society, which took the leading role in national movements

Thirteen years ago the present writer undertook a similar survey of the works of Nikita Khrushchev. Appearing within a few weeks of that Soviet leader’s well-celebrated seventieth birthday, the article assumed (as Khrushchev probably did) that there was some connection between the ornaments of power and its reality. Yet by the end of the year Khrushchev had been hustled into retirement by the Central Committee, an act that, incidentally, allowed the review article to stand as a definitive one in the sense that no additional books by that particular author could appear in’ the USSR. It seems doubtful that the present survey will be able to make the same claim. Despite the close parallel in the timing of their collected works in the lives of the two septuagenarian leaders, it does not seem that Brezhnev’s administration will end before more volumes will be added to those listed here.

In Tsvetaeva’s work, earth is essentially a place of exile where her persona stands “with only one foot.” From its confines she time and again seeks to return to her original home in the sky by escaping into the worlds of dreams, poetry, and, for a while, an impassioned correspondence. Perhaps nowhere is Tsvetaeva’s otherworldly orientation more strongly evident than in the imagery of her numerous flights, evocations of azure skies, and artistic simulations of the air and space of dreams. These pervade the poemy written at the time of the civil war and the correspondence-related works of the mid-twenties. In the late twenties and thirties, by contrast, there is a conscious turning away from aerial imagery to the immediate world, and finally at turning away from poetry itself to death.