Politically, the phrase “Polish October” refers to the installation of a new government in October 1956, along with the hopes this event inspired for a more liberalized regime. In cultural terms, however, the Polish October is analogous to the “Thaw” in the Soviet Union—but much warmer—and it includes a period of about two or three years, roughly from 1955 to 1958, during which intense debate, settling of accounts, and a reevaluation of tradition took place. Socialist Realism was discredited once and for all, and a burst of new publishing occurred. Drawers were emptied of manuscripts by already established writers as well as by those who were making belated debuts, while postwar West European literature appeared in translation. In addition, many forgotten or forbidden works of Polish interwar literature were reissued, and a selective program of publishing emigre works in Poland was initiated.

Popular literature often appropriates the structural patterns of folklore. V. P. Adrianova-Peretts has observed that in Russian narrative literature prior to the 1760s it is difficult to draw a distinct line between folklore and formal literature. Discussions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Russian adventure tales, the first body of original prose fiction to enjoy widespread success in Russia, have traditionally noted use of folkloric motifs, usually citing isolated moments rather than basic, underlying plot structures as examples. In fact, however, the fairytale plot, as outlined by Vladimir Propp in The Morphology of the Fairy Tale, forms the skeleton of most Russian prose tales of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The first (and last) Soviet scholar to survey the history of the Imperial Free Economic Society (Imperatorskoe Vol'noe Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo, or VEO) arrived at the reasonable conclusion that this important organization deserves far greater notice than it has hitherto received. The same is true of the Society's remarkable and remarkably neglected library, barely mentioned even in the same scholar's monograph but preserved almost intact in Leningrad today. The later activities of the Free Economic Society—the oldest (1765-1919) and most influential economic society in Russia—will be pursued elsewhere as part of a broader inquiry, but a brief note on its library is offered here to alert researchers to the potential usefulness of this unique store of economic, social, technical, and statistical materials.

The Russian ancien régime presents a paradox. Like other anciens régimes, it exhibited many signs of decay. The government had been unsuccessful in its major military enterprises ever since the Crimean War, its diplomatic defeats ranging from the Congress of Berlin to the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1909. Failure abroad was accompanied by signs of weakness within. The crisis of 1879-82 had shown the strength of internal opposition. In 1905, ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan proved to be the prelude to a revolution that shook tsarism to its foundations and clearly displayed its structural weaknesses. The last two “Autocrats of All Russia” were men of mediocre talent. The tsarist court, especially under Nicholas II, was ridden with scandals typical of a declining, unsure, and, indeed, frightened regime. Meanwhile, Russia’s ruling class, the hereditary landed nobility, improvident and debt-ridden, its landholdings reduced from 73.1 million desiatins in 1877 to a mere 43.2 million by 1911, was in headlong decline.