Since World War II a great number and variety of books, pamphlets, and articles devoted in whole or in part to international law have appeared in the Soviet Union. Not all of these publications are available in the United States. The articles are too numerous to be listed here. Substantial contributions have appeared not only in the central legal periodicals such as Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo (Soviet State and Law) and Izvestija Akademii Nauk SSSR, Otdelenie Èkonomiki i Prava (News of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Section of Economics and Law), but also in the publications of institutions of higher learning and research in the provinces as well as in Moscow and Leningrad. The books include general texts, specialized monographs, collections of documents, and dictionaries. Popular lectures touching on problems of international law have been recorded and distributed in pamphlet form. This extensive literature may help outsiders to understand the Soviet conception of international law, its role in Soviet policy, and its value in predicting future Soviet actions and attitudes.

Nearly a century ago, there was found among the posthumous papers of Ioann Batonishvili, son of Giorgi XII, the last king of Georgia, an apparently incomplete manuscript treatise, containing articles in dialogue form on all kinds of topics, and interspersed with lively episodes from Georgian life. This treatise, which became known as the “Kalmasoba,” at once aroused interest, and sections of it were published by the historian D. Bak‘radze in 1862. Only the first part was known to Bak‘radze, however, as the manuscript had been divided into two portions after Ioann's death in 1830: the first portion passed to Ioann's brother-in-law, Grigol Tseret‘eli, the other to his grandson Prince Ivan Gruzinskij and from his collection to the St. Petersburg Public Library. The latter part was long thought in Georgia to be lost, and it was only after the 1917 Revolution, when some of the Georgian manuscripts from Russian collections were transferred to the new University of Tiflis, that the complete text could be reconstituted.

Soviet Periodicals Proclaim the dawn of a new day for the apartment dweller of the USSR. Yet after thirty-four years of experimentation based upon an entirely new concept of housing relationships, the urban housing problem in the USSR seems to have become even more acute than it was at the outbreak of the Revolution. It is true that in pre-revolutionary Russia, with its economic backwardness and underdeveloped urban life and economy, there was a great lag in housing construction. No compiled data exist, however, from which it would be possible to construct a completely accurate picture of the housing conditions of the 24,700,000 persons who made up the urban population of pre-revolutionary Russia. It has been estimated that the average space available to the individual in 1912–1914 was 6.6 square yards.

Receipt from Australia of a volume of new translations of Pushkin's lyrics suggests some observations on the problems of translating poetry. Mr. Morrison, the author of the book, begins his prefatory note by quoting one of the wise and charming remarks of Don Quixote: “Translation from one language into another … is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the figures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side.” I think that Mr. Morrison had a good idea in protecting himself with Don Quixote's Flemish tapestry. Traduttore-traditore is an old slogan. It is a known fact that there is nothing more difficult than a poetic translation. Leibniz went even farther; he maintained that in general it is impossible for one language to reproduce another with equal force and adequate expression. Very close to this idealistic conception of language is Croce in his Aesthetics, based on the absolute unity of form and content.