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.

When The Master and Margarita first appeared some five years ago in the journal Moskva and soon after in the English translations, it caused the sensation appropriate to long-withheld Russian literary works. On all sides it was hailed as a literary event of broad implications. American and British reviewers, introducing Bulgakov to their reading public, stressed the significance of this thirty-year-old novel in relation to progressive tendencies in contemporary Soviet literature. The novel was also generally assessed as a work of major literary importance in its own right. But there were reservations. Rich in conception and striking in form, The Master and Margarita seemed to many somehow flawed in the execution. These readers found the book extremely attractive on various levels, yet felt, along with the novel's British translator, Michael Glenny, that the keystone had just missed being slipped into place.

The Romanov dynasty came to the throne in 1613 after fifteen years of pretenders, peasant revolts, and foreign interventions, but the establishment of Romanov legitimacy would require time. In this article, Russell E. Martin explores how the wedding ritual of Tsar Mikhail Romanov was carefully constructed on the basis of previous royal weddings so as to appear fully consistent with previous Muscovite tradition. But Martin also shows that many elements of the wedding ritual were choreographed anew to create the image of the Romanovs as the legitimate heirs of the old Riurikid dynasty that had died out in 1598. Viewed in light of other efforts to legitimate their rule, the evidence from the weddings of the first Romanov tsar suggests how tenuous the new dynasty's hold on power was in its first decades on the throne and the ways that symbol and ritual were exploited to help establish the new regime.

Tolstoy the man, whose awe-inspiring personality haunts us still, poses an enormous obstacle to those who wish to write about his work. One frequently encounters interpretations of the novels, plays, and short stories based on Tolstoy's aims in creating them and on what his consciously held values were or are believed to have been. Unfortunately for anyone who attempts this kind of evaluation, Tolstoy, one of the most complex and baffling men who ever lived, is notorious for his self-contradictions. Although we have some good biographies, Tolstoy deserves the attention of a scholar—probably not a literary critic—with a sophisticated view of human personality and the relationship between the individual and society, who will write an analytical account of his problems comparable to Erik Erikson's widely admired Young Man Luther.

Count M. M. Speranskij, undoubtedly one of the most brilliant statesmen tsarist Russia has ever produced, wrote in the Introduction to the Code of Laws of 1809, that the “Russian constitution will owe its existence not to the excitement of passions and the exigency of circumstances, but to the blessed inspiration of the Supreme Power…”. He was wrong. The “blessed” Supreme Power granted reforms to the Russian people only reluctantly and, with few exceptions, always under pressure of revolutionary impact.

The “psychoprophylactic method” of preventing or minimizing pain in childbirth was developed in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s by Il'ia Zakharevich Vel'vovskii, a neurologist working at the Ministry of Transport's Central Psychoneurological Hospital for Southern Railroad Workers in Khar'kov. In 1951 the Ministry of Health adopted Vel'vovskii's method as standard procedure for normal births in all obstetrical institutions in the USSR and undertook a large-scale program to provide the facilities and trained personnel for its implementation. This decision was based on more than simple recognition of a successful medical innovation, particularly since Soviet obstetricians were far from giving it unqualified approval. It owed more to the political and ideological imperatives of Stalin's regime which were then intruding deeply into the work of Soviet scientists and physicians.

The first book of Tolstoy's War and Peace contains an episode from the Allied War Council at Olmütz, on November 27, 1805, five days before the Battle of Austerlitz. With the Council over, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky takes Prince Boris Drubetskoy, a new aide-de-camp, to present him to Tsar Alexander. Coming out of the emperor's room as they approach is a tall man in civilian dress who has a striking face and sharply projecting jaw, which gives him a peculiar vivacity and keenness of expression. “Who was that ?” asks Drubetskoy. “He is one of the most remarkable but to me most unpleasant of men—the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski,” replies Bolkonsky.

In the modern era, the institution of literature is being reconceived across Europe as a national institution. But the new paradigm of national literatures requires a remaking of literary discourse, including the transformation of critical terminology, and this results in literary discourse becoming politicized. By analyzing the history of the term libozvučnost (melodiousness) in the Czech national literary revival, David L. Cooper demonstrates how this seemingly innocent literary term became a political lightening rod for friends pursuing the same national program. This strongly suggests that, in the formative era of national literatures, using literary issues to discuss politics is not simply a matter of instrumentalizing literary criticism for covert political activity but that discussing literary values is directly political. The example of libozvučnost also reveals how the “borrowed“ discourses of Romanticism and nationalism were fundamentally remade to respond to the modern Czech situation.

The question “Did Peter the Great exert a beneficial or a harmful influence upon the development of Russian history and culture?” is one that has provoked debate ever since that monarch ruled Russia in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The varied answers to that question set up the general battle lines between Westernizers and Slavophiles during the first half of the nineteenth century. One of Russia's most critical intellectuals in that period, Peter Iakovlevich Chaadaev, answered the question in several ways. His answers provide a key to a peculiar kind of ideological westernization in Russian intellectual history. The discovery of hitherto unpublished source materials that fill an important gap in the documentation of Chaadaev's views on Peter the Great led to the writing of this article.

Modernist prose forms often present the reader with the paradox of cerebral, structurally complex works which express an irrational or antirational content. These works seek an almost geometric perfection of form while simultaneously rejecting intellect as a totally inadequate means of conceiving contemporary experience. Strikingly often it is a witch of a rather special breed who provides the essential thematic and narrative elements without which the intellectual pattern of the novel could not crystallize out. That voyantes and sorceresses should people the prose of Western surrealists such as Andre Breton is not too surprising, but it is surely a nice problem that two of the most self-consciously modernist Soviet novels, Fedin's Cities and Years and Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, should depend for both their compositional and moral energies on witches.

Soviet statements of policy on nationality relations traditionally have expressed a commitment to equalize economic development among the union republics of the USSR. As early as the 1920s, Soviet leaders promised to reduce differences between more advanced and more backward republics. The program adopted in 1961 by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reaffirmed the intention of “devoting special attention to those areas of the country which are in need of more rapid development.” The goal of economic equalization among union republics is said by Soviet sources to have broad social and political significance, and the elimination of disparities in the economic base is thought to be necessary for the achievement of harmony among Soviet nationalities.

The present study is intended as an over-all view of teaching and research in the Slavic and East European Field. Almost ten years had elapsed since Coleman's third survey, published in 1948, and the need for a new study became increasingly apparent. The writer's survey was begun during the academic year 1954-1955, and certain phases of the investigation continued until the present. During 1954-1955 questionnaires were sent to all the 183 American and Canadian institutions reported as teaching Russian by the Modern Language Association of America. The list, compiled as the result of a survey, appeared in the September, 1954, issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association (LXIX, 29-30).

Why the paradox of a revolt against the Communist regime in Russia in a place which had been a Bolshevik stronghold at the time of the October Revolution? Like many paradoxes, this one, when understood, leads to valuable insights. The effort to comprehend the causes and aims of the Kronstadt revolt sheds much additional light on the contemporary nature of the Soviet regime, the crisis which it was then experiencing, and the trend of its evolution. Conversely, the Kronstadt movement itself becomes much more intelligible when viewed in this broader context.

The revolt did not actually begin as such, but rather as a mass movement of protest, which was symptomatic of the general state of internal crisis in Soviet Russia. Military Communism had reached an impasse; violent intervention by the State into all aspects of economic life, particularly the requisitions from, the peasantry, together with the unemployment and shortages resulting from the general collapse of the nation's economy, had in many places brought large segments of the population to the verge of open revolt against the Soviet regime. In some instances, armed peasant uprisings had broken out, notably in Tambov gubernija.

How did the reading material enjoyed by Nicholas I differ from that of one of his stokers? This article focuses on the novels enjoyed by a broad spectrum of readers at the court of Nicholas I, from the tsar himself and the members of the imperial family to their servants, shedding new light on certain mechanisms of court culture. Based on archival sources such as the loan registers and the correspondence of the tsar's and the palace staff's libraries, this paper shows how, despite social and cultural differences, these two communities of readers actually often ended up reading the same authors and novels. What distinguished them was less their consumption of different texts than the way in which they read and interpreted the same books and, more generally, the different purpose that they attributed to reading. Based on their position at court and what they experienced in the Winter Palace—a political cabinet in which state ideology was discussed, a place in which courtiers felt suffocated by hierarchies and etiquette, or a place where servants could find otherwise unobtainable books—reading novels could constitute either a form of social control, escapism, or a school of good taste and proper behavior.