Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.

S. S. Uvarov, minister of education from 1833 to 1849, is usually described as a reactionary. The reason for that judgment is clear. Many of the steps Uvarov took as minister seemed designed to block the realization of the liberal goals set by the reformers who assisted Alexander I in founding the modern Russian educational system in 1801-4. One important aspect of that liberal, modern, system was its “all-class” character. An educational system which admitted students of all classes was perceived by “reactionaries“ as a threat to the established order, despite the relatively small numbers of people involved. Thus, “Uvarov was disturbed by the trickle of students from lower classes who were finding their way into the universities. As in secondary schools, the admission of such students was hindered by legalistic formalities and an increase in tuition fees.“

Some seventeen years ago, P. N. Berkov wrote: “The least-known aspect of the still comparatively unexplored field of Anglo-Russian cultural relations in the eighteenth century is that of the history of the stage and of stage-plays.“ The statement is hardly less true today. Berkov went on to say that a single question—“that of how far the Russian reader and theatergoer was familiar with Shakespeare’s work“—had attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention. Even in this area, however, work remains to be done, and it will be the aim of the present essay, by demonstrating the relationship between Kheraskov’s drama Gonimye and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to add a small but necessary link to the chain of our knowledge of Shakespeare in Russia.

Contemporaries and latter-day critics of Constantine Leontiev have tended to respond to him in one of two ways. The first and by far the more common approach has focused on his reactionary political views, homosexuality, and quirks of personal life; the second, on his talent as a writer. The eccentric psychopolitical image of Leontiev created in the first instance has injected a paradoxical note of disharmony into the appreciation of a seemingly inverse grace and form in his fiction. The man has come to represent one thing, his literary work something quite different and unrelated. Although critics like Vasilii Rozanov, Nicholas Berdiaev, and Father Georges Florovsky have hinted at the ideological factors which suggest possible ways of resolving this paradox, no real organic interpretation explaining Leontiev’s fiction in terms of his own cultural situation, his ideas, beliefs, and ideological problems is available.

On August 6, 1919, a bloodless coup d'état occurred in Budapest, forcing the Socialist “trade union” government to resign, and bringing Hungary’s radical phase to an abrupt end. Hungary’s revolutionary experiments had been resounding failures, and the majority of the population was relieved. The first revolution of October 31, 1918 had promised democracy, independence, and unimpaired territorial integrity but had brought instead only disappointments— political instability and foreign occupation. The second revolution, which declared Hungary a Soviet republic on March 21, 1919, was no more successful than the first. The proletarian dictatorship, originally welcomed as a remedy for the discredited democratic institutions, rapidly lost its appeal, and the world revolution, initially held out as an answer to Hungary’s territorial mutilation, failed to become a reality. By the end of July, the Rumanian army was at the gates of Budapest and internal dissatisfaction had assumed threatening proportions.

Over twenty years ago Merle Fainsod warned against underestimating the “fluid play of bureaucratic politics” in the Stalinist political system. However, scholars have generally regarded the Secretariat of the Central Committee (CC) of the VKP(b) as immune to this process during Stalin’s reign as general secretary. They have assumed either that Stalin did not permit conflict between the directors of the various bureaucratic divisions in the Secretariat or that such conflict could simply not develop in the leading organ of the party’s apparat.

A score of years ago geography was characterized as spatial interaction, the underlying concepts of which were complementarity, intervening opportunities, and distance. Without additional consideration of the first two, the last of these concepts is intrinsic to this study. According to Ullman, distance, which may be interpreted in many ways, is measured economically, that is, in terms of the cost and time involved in transporting a product. A good is transportable only when its inherent value is sufficient to overcome the “friction“ of distance. Hoover states this clearly: “When goods of high value per pound are shipped, the transfer charge constitutes a smaller relative addition to the total cost of the delivered article, and such goods are said to be ‘more transportable’ or to be capable of bearing a higher transfer charge.“