It was a wintry evening in 1911. The weekly Wednesday gathering at the “tower”, the residence of the erudite poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, was in full swing. Here was represented the flower of the St. Petersburg poetical world. Poets well established, those less established, and the beginners recited in turn and awaited the verdict of the host. Usually this verdict was politely deadly. The sentence thus pronounced was mitigated only by the realization that it was always to the point and always just. Hence even the slightest approval was a triumph for the victim.

If a Polish Tennyson were to appear, intent on composing a Polish Idylls, the maiden he would have to choose from the national gallery for his “lily-maid” Elaine would be the one bearing the simple but euphonious name Wanda. Similarly, if some Polish Shakespeare were to arise, and if he were to undertake the writing of a Polish Lear, he too would have to use this Wanda, in the role of the third daughter Cordelia. At the same time, the Polish writer seeking a figure in his nation's past akin to the Englishman's Boadicea would likewise be obliged to turn to this very Wanda. For in the Polish Wanda, as she has come to be enshrined in the national vocabulary, are to be found the qualities of mind and heart for which each of these three characters, so familiar and so different, are famous: here we have the pure white chastity of Elaine and the filial devotion of Cordelia; here also the Amazonian sternness and manly vigor of the iron-willed Boadicea.

For a long time critics and readers were inclined to evaluate women writers in a more or less patronizing manner. It was said that women, though keyed to creative expression, should not reveal too much of their feelings and idiosyncrasies in the presence of the public. Furthermore, it was stated that the literary work of most women writers is unsubstantial, hence there should not be the slightest doubt that nature endowed them with insufficient creative ability. Rousseau in Emile says that the whole instruction of women ought to be relative to men to make them happy; a desirable point of view, but it certainly limits the scope of feminine activity. To be sure, Balzac in his letters called George Sand “my dear George” which, however, did not signify a recognition of equal attainments in the realm of fiction, but the expressed and somewhat ironic awareness of a literary person who happened to be a woman and enjoyed dressing as a man. One cannot brush aside the fact that in an atmosphere filled with the illusion and delusion of masculine superiority and influenced by literary misogynists, there was little opportunity for the objective estimation of women writers and their works. Only in relatively recent times could one observe a departure from such critical uneasiness and one-sided judgment.

Among the chief landmarks of pre-war Kiev prior to the demolition of the structure in 1935-37 was the mediaeval but much-restored cathedral of St. Michael. This edifice was conspicuously situated northeast of St. Sophia near the edge of a bluff overlooking the lower city, and its gilded cupolas caused the institution around it to be known as the Monastery of St. Michael with the Golden Domes (Zlatoverkho-Mikhailovsky Monastyr').

The Treaties of Tartu, Moscow, and Riga (1920), riders to the Treaty of Versailles in their acceptance of ethnic self-sufficiency, recognized the four major peoples of the East Baltic littoral area as political entities with the unhampered right to live their present and to determine their future. Whatever may have been the hopes and doubts of those who framed the treaty, its short-term results must have exceeded the most liberal expectations. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in twenty-one packed years of independent existence, showed that a national will, if wisely directed, could maintain economic and political stability, be tolerant to national minorities, and enrich culture with new values.

Among the papers and notebooks left unpublished by Count Alexei Tolstoy at his death on September 28, 1875 there was a poem of sixteen lines in the ballad style entitled Garal'd Svengol'm, or, as we should say, Harold Svenholm. It was published two years later in Katkov's Russky Vestnik, and with it there went a brief, unilluminative editorial note:

There are many, more or less eyewitness reports of the events in Russia during and after the March Revolution of 1917. Professor Dimitri von Mohrenschildt recently published a very useful analysis listing some twenty-five writers who undertook to report these events to American readers. Some were notoriously sympathetic and others were equally hostile, but very few were politically neutral. Most reporters were more interested in selling than in telling.

The isolated character of the Hungarian language is one reason why Hungary seems in political, psychological and cultural contrast with other European countries. Therefore it is quite important for the Hungarian nation to reach the outside world through a language of universal appeal. It was a wise choice of Hungarian publicists, scholars and writers to have their works printed in the English language.

Although events since the end of the last war have brought the problem of understanding Russia into sharp projection, the problem itself is not new nor is it confined to the period of the Soviet dictatorship. From the time of Possevinus' and Herberstein's accounts of Moscovite Russia under Tsar Ivan IV, called the Terrible, to contemporary reports on Soviet Russia, the Russian state and the Russian people seem to have been to the Western mind something from a different world. Therefore, from the earliest time of contacts with Russia in the so-called modern and contemporary periods of history, the Western world set up different standards from its own in order to try to understand this vast country.