¹ Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik.

² Vera Aleksandrova, Literatura i Zhizri', Ocherki sovetskpgo obshchestvennogo razvitiya do kpntsa vtoroy mirovoy voyny [Literature and Life, Essays in Soviet Social Development until the end of World War II] (New York 1969). Let me add that my translation in the preceding title of obshchestvennyi by “social” is somewhat problematic. Since this is a central term in Russian intellectual history and, more specifically, is important for the understanding of Aleksandrova's thought, I shall say something more in the text about the meaning of the term and the problem of rendering it in English.

³ Nastroeniya is again difficult to translate. It actually means “convictions,” “beliefs,” “attitudes,” and the connotation of their being something fleeting and superficialmoods in the proper sense of the word—is only vaguely implied.

⁴ To underline the particular nature of the present volume, I should mention at this point that some years ago Aleksandrova published a History of Soviet Literature, 1971-1962 (New York 1963). That book, too, reveals all her fine qualities as a writer, but its focus is very different. It deals primarily with the individual writers, their life histories, their individualities, the literary merits of their writings. She discussed there, e.g. Dostoyevsky's influence on Leonov, or Babel's creative processes, or Pasternak's use of language. The book also shows much more clearly her deep love for literature as an art that at times perhaps makes her exaggerate the achievements of writers such as Sholokhov or Alexey Tolstoy. But although there, as in the articles in the present volume, her gift for precise summaries of novels and plays is in full evidence, the nature of the summaries is very different. The social and political problems and the development of Soviet society are hardly emphasized, so that even Doctor Zhivago is presented mostly as casting light on Pasternak's “spiritual development” rather than on the momentous historical problems diat are the substance of the novel. At the same time, one of the great charms and intriguing problems of the present volume that stem from its being a series of current, contemporaneous observations is absent from the earlier book. There naturally is some overlapping, but essentially the present volume is altogether independent. Thus the previous publication, which is a good but much more conventional history of literature, could not possibly interfere with publication of the present volume in an English translation.

⁵ “A Neglected Source of Information on Soviet Russia” Reprinted in Gerschenkron, Alexander, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass. 1962Google Scholar), chap. 12.

⁶ The term meshchanstvo again is broader than petty-bourgeoisie. It refers both to a social stratum and to mental attitudes which roughly may be described as “philistine.” Neither term yields a perfect rendition.

⁷ The second part was returned to the author with request for revisions; it was not published until about a quarter of a century later and turned out to be an extremely weak piece of mediocre, if not vulgar, writing, deserving little interest.

⁸ Ibid., 48.

⁹ Lenin, V. I., Speech, May 19, 1919, Sochineniya, 4th edition (Moscow 1950), xxix, 346.Google Scholar

¹⁰ In fact, a comparison between Soviet Russia and the epoch of Peter the Great appeared in Soviet literature even several years earlier in a novel by Leonov, and in a couple of novels by Pilnyak, but there the references to Peter were hardly more than fleeting remarks by some of the novels’ heroes, and while Aleksandrova duly registered them (p. 69), she attributed then (in 1930) no particular importance to them.

¹¹ In Soviet literary criticism, Sholokhov's treatment of Grigorii's unhappy end is praised as revealing the “militant Communist truth” of the work, while Sholokhov's real motivation is somewhat disguised by references to “the bourgeois conditions of life” and “the world of private property” that had “crippled” Grigorii's soul. Even quotations from Engels are adduced to show both the inevitability of Grigorii's fate and die “ideological correctness” of Sholokhov's treatment of his hero. Cf. Yakimenko, L., Tvorchestvo M. A. Sholokhova [The Work of M. A. Sholokhov] (Moscow 1964), 264Google Scholar–65. Authoritative interpretations of this sort have been generally accepted and have penetrated into the run-of-the-mill college textbooks on Soviet literature. Cf., e.g., the book by a very different and very inferior Aleksandrova, L. P., Russkaya Sovetskaya Literatura [Russian Soviet literature] (Kiev 1964), 56Google Scholar.