On August 26, 1797, in the little village of Anginskoe, Irkutsk Province, a boy was born to the local sacristan Popov and his wife, and was given the name of Ivan.

Little Ivan was a bright child. At the age of four the boy, under the tutelage of his ailing father, had started to read, and by 1803, when his father died, the boy read fluently.

To ease the burden of Ivan's mother, now a widow with four children, Ivan's uncle, who was his father's brother and the local deacon, took the boy into his own family.

Does a centralized system of direct controls necessarily provide the most effective method of control? A case study of the postwar Yugoslav banking system raises serious doubts on this score. The Yugoslav National Bank has not lost any control and may even have established a firmer control over the country's monetary system since 1954. At that time, it moved closer to the traditional central bank role of exercising indirect control over independent banks instead of performing all its functions through its own branches, over which it had direct control.

The recently published correspondence of maxim gorky and leonid andreev reveals many hitherto hidden aspects of the relationship between these two writers. In a graphic way, the letters show the rise of this significant personal and literary friendship, the strains and stresses which led to a cooling of attitudes, and finally the vain efforts, especially on the part of Andreev, to keep alive a relationship doomed to failure.

An outstanding feature in the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe has been its economic tutelage. During the early postwar years when political control was established over the region, crude spoliation highlighted Soviet economic activities. Shortly thereafter, however, a drastic transformation of the East European economies was instituted in accordance with Soviet dicta. This transformation revolved around two fundamental developments—rapid industrialization modelled on the Soviet pattern and almost inextricable economic ties with the Soviet Union.

Since its appearance in 1928, Mikhail Sholokhov's Silent Don has undergone countless revisions so that a definitive edition which included all the variant readings would necessarily contain lengthy and complex annotation. Moreover, the task of editing a definitive edition without Sholokhov's personal supervision and without access to his manuscripts and letters is clearly impossible. One can, however, detail accurately the major changes which have occurred in various editions of the novel, realizing that almost every edition (about 135 by 1958) contains some emendation.

Although comprehensive economic data on the Russian economy during the period of the Crimean War are not available, there are some surprisingly complete series of data on prices in both internal and foreign trade. The implications that can be drawn from a study of changes in the price level cover a wide area, especially when they are studied in the light of earlier work on the monetary and fiscal problems of the period.

Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals felt themselves cut off from the uneducated masses and thought the gap could be bridged by some form of harmo niouscivilization. In Russia, a new liberalism spread after 1811-15, when young Russian officers returned from Germany and France, and culminated in the December, 1825, uprising. Less political, but much more numerous and influential, were the young philosophers who discovered the old Greek authors, Voltaire, and Hegel.

When one is considering the progress, in Poland, of the recent events which are commonly referred to as the "thaw," it is important to keep well in mind certain specific features of the Polish nation and of the Communist rule in that country. They help to explain why the "thaw" took the course it did, why it was a rather more outspoken process than one might expect on the basis of the analogous phenomenon in the Soviet Union, and why, for a certain time, it seemed to be escaping the control of the state apparatus—only to stop short of any demand for complete freedom.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who wrote in German, left the vast majority of his works unpublished, many of them even unfinished, and was known only to a narrow literary circle when he died. Karel Capek (1890-1938), writing in Czech, published numerous works and was famous both in Czechoslovakia and abroad during his lifetime. Kafka's reputation has grown since his death, however, as his works continued to be published posthumously, and the world in the era of Hitler and World War II found them engrossing and relevant.

Printing, as a German perfection, was brought to the Slavs by a German craftsman, Sweipolt Fiol, who is considered the first Slavic printer of Cyrillic characters. Fiol's printed church book, Oktoich, in Slavic language with Cyrillic characters, appeared in 1491 in Cracow, Poland. It is considered one of the first Cyrillic incunabula of Eastern Europe.

Lucia Merecka Borski, in an article dealing with the early printing in Poland, stated that "Toward the end of the fifteenth century" a "printing house was opened in Krakow by Swietopelk Fiol (Szwaybold Feyl, Fejel, Szwajpolt Fieola, Fiola) who issued five books in the Cyrillic alphabet about the year 1491."

This paper will attempt to present a picture of the Soviet system for the bibliographical listing of all printed matter published in the Soviet Union.

These listings are accomplished through official bibliographical publications, compiled and issued by the "Vsesojuznaja Knizhnaja Palata" (All-Union Book Chamber) located in Moscow, which was established in 1920 and has existed since then under a number of official names.

In the years since the end of the Second World War American interest in Russia has steadily grown, and Russian studies in the United States have expanded at a rapid rate. In 1956, as the first decade of postwar development in this field drew to a close, a number of those concerned with Russian studies became convinced that a review of the record and a new look at the goals to be sought in the study of Russia would be beneficial. A general assessment of Russian studies in the United States was therefore made by the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, a body of scholars engaged in research and teaching relating to Russia and Eastern Europe appointed jointly by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.