All Important Soviet Writers have been united in the Union of Soviet Writers since its formation in 1934. Throughout its history, the Union has played a key part in the Soviet system of literary controls, and an understanding of the organization's mode of operation is thus necessary in any consideration of the forces which shape the course of Soviet literature. A study of the Writers’ Union also has a bearing outside the field of literature, casting light upon the operation of one type of Soviet “public” organization.

It is surprising to find in 1956 a review of a book one published in 1948, in a journal that reviewed it when it first appeared. Had Dr. Szeftel been asked to review it then, what he has written might have seemed one-sided and destructive to those who knew the book and to its author, but I should not have felt impelled to reply, nor would this journal have given me the space.

In addition to being the father of Russian Marxism, Georgij Valentinovich Plekhanov was the founder of Marxian esthetics. On the basis of the slender and fleeting hints in the works of Marx and Engels, he did more than any of his Marxist contemporaries to build a systematic Marxian esthetic.

So great was the influence of his esthetic legacy upon Soviet theoreticians that by 1928 Valer'jan Poljanskij could claim that "all contemporary art and literary science are built upon the work which was left to us by Plekhanov."

The unification of private law with the corrolary task of codifying it into a single code has proved to be everywhere a long, complicated and very difficult task. Two recent well-known examples are the unification of German law into the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch which lasted from 1874 until 1896; and of Swiss law extending over the period from 1874 to the codes of 1907 and 1911. The analogous work performed a century earlier in Austria extended from 1753 until 1811. The unification of French civil law lasted, in spite of revolutionary zeal, virtually from 1789 until 1804.

The most widely established principle concerning the use of foreign geographical names is that the original name-forms, current in the respective countries, should be used. This—in itself a sound principle—requires the transliteration of names which originally stand in alphabets other than Latin. The problems created by the application of this principle are not unsolvable and several adequate transliteration systems are currently in use. The present article, however, does not intend to discuss the respective merits or shortcomings of these different transliteration systems. Its purpose is rather to indicate some awkward results produced by a too rigid adherence to the rules for transliteration.

Chekhov's use of literary allusions or echoes represents one of the most striking variations of the playwright's many evocative devices. Such devices, which stand outside the immediate action of his later plays, frequently are of symbolic significance and sometimes have a commentary function similar to that of the Greek chorus. Chekhov's use of literary or folklore allusions in his later plays is usually eclectic and may shift from author to author, folksong to folksong. Quotations from Shakespeare, especially from Hamlet, occur in various plays of Chekhov. But in the Seagull we find more than incidental background snatches from Hamlet. For Hamlet appears related to the total structure of the play, and it would seem that the image of Hamlet is, in the intent of the playwright, most intimately connected with the situations and characters of the Seagull.

The Decade of The 1840's is one of the most fascinating in the whole of Russian literature, and one of the least understood. Historians of literature, in patronizing perspective, are wont to view it as a “pre-“ period, as a preparation to the great age of the novel which was to follow. Since the Russian novel was not fashioned at mid-century by the accidental confluence of three of four writers of genius, beginnings must be sought: the forties, the age of the Natural School, serve the purpose admirably. The Natural School writers, so-called because of their fondness for depicting “life in the raw,” laid the foundation for the realistic novel of mid-century. Their negative, critical approach (derived chiefly from the satiric naturalism of Gogol) was responsible for the creation of a homogeneous body of literature: philanthropic stories on the poor, the physiological sketch, the social criticism of Belinskij, and the first successes of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Nekrasov. The movement was short-lived, and produced few literary works of great intrinsic merit.

Between the formative years of the eighteenth century, when Russian literature was at school to Western Europe, and the decade of the 1840's, when the native genius achieved unequivocal expression, there lie three significant decades during which the Russian spirit strove to find itself. The weight of tradition lay with British and French literary models, the displacement of which is effected not by head-on revolt, but by the introduction of German literary models as a counterweight. It has long been recognized that the process was initiated by the poet V. A. Zhukovskij, tentatively and uncertainly at first, and then sustained by him with vigor, especially in the years 1815-18, when his translations from the poetry of Goedie and Schiller appeared in profusion.

Swift said in a letter to Pope that life is a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition. That is to say, life is self-contradictory, which is not only awkward but, from the viewpoint of a novelist, unsuccessful. To make good art—to compose, through use of images or symbols, a nonself-contradictory entity including and exceeding experience—you must get away from life without, obviously, ignoring or denying life. You may take any attitude toward life, toward what you have, provided you simultaneously affirm the negation of existing reality—ultimate freedom. You write satire because you don't like what you have but know that you need it.

Since the Russian language until lately has been neglected far more than Western European languages, one might expect publishers to exercise more than usual care with translations of Russian works otherwise widely inaccessible. Unfortunately, unusual care was not exercised in the preparation of the English version of Mikhail Sholokhov's Silent Don. Published originally by Putnam and Company in England and reprinted without alteration in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, the novel appeared between 1934 and 1941. (In the Soviet Union it appeared serially and in four separate volumes between 1928 and 1940.) Evidently with the approval of Sholokhov's agents in Moscow, the English editor omitted over a hundred pages of Russian text, altered the sequence of the narrative, and introduced new chapter, section, and paragraph divisions. Presumably this was done with no thought for politics or ideology but solely on the basis of aesthetic or practical considerations, the aim being to make the novel less expensive and to improve it by rejecting superfluous descriptions and characters.