In the Nazi search for Lebensraum the Ukraine was assigned a highly important role. Nazi leaders viewed the abundance of Ukrainian raw materials as a valuable source of supply for German industry. They considered the Ukraine's fertile soil not only as a significant food base for the Third Reich, but also as an indispensable area for future German agricultural settlement. Finally, they envisaged the Ukraine's strategic location as an excellent starting point for further German economic and political penetration into Central Asia, the Near and the Middle East.

Twenty years ago the League of Nations met defeat in its only serious attempt to impose economic and financial sanctions against one of its members. At that time the USSR was a strong supporter of a system of collective security against the threats of Germany and Japan, and the chief Soviet delegate at Geneva, Maxim Litvinov, took a consistent stand for stronger measures against Italy. In numerous statements he warned his colleagues that sanctions must be made to work against Italy because more serious threats to world peace were on the horizon.

A unique occasion for outside observation of Soviet local administration arose when the German forces invaded the USSR in 1941. While they generally appear to have devoted little study to this aspect of the Soviet system, German military authorities did compile extensive information on administration in nine predominantly agricultural Ukrainian rajons. Analysis of these reports provides detailed statistical data on the Soviet administrative apparatus in what was probably a typical area of the Ukraine.

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of Poland's bituminous coal. It is her major natural resource and the most important single item in supplying foreign exchange. Coal provides the main source of industrial energy, and is the principal raw material for her expanding chemical industries and metallurgy. Coal mining overshadows her other mining and quarrying industries, constituting roughly two-thirds of the net material product contributed by the mineral industries to the net national product. Poland ranks as the fifth largest coal producer in the world.

Among different genres of historical writing, historical biography seems to have exerted in recent years a particularly strong attraction on students of history. This attraction is easily explicable: the life of a person provides a clearly outlined chronological and topical pattern, while within it liberty still remains for the literary or psychological treatment of outstanding personal events. This latter opportunity has greatly enlarged the circle of historical biographers, bringing into it writers, whose interest and method is less historical than purely biographical. This advent of the biographers might be welcomed if it were accompanied by the recognition of the necessity to borrow from the historian his method, whenever nonbiographical problems appear in the historical biography. Still, a method is not easily borrowed, and writers skilled in other fields such as literature or journalism have sometimes erred on this score. This study has been undertaken in order to show through the analysis of an outstanding case the danger of such neglect of historical method.

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.

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.

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.