I would like to begin this investigation of Pushkinian thematics with a fable, or better perhaps, a parable of my own making.

Once upon a time in the land of Rus’ there lived two brothers. And although they were sired by a noble father and reared as befits the sons of a nobleman, they differed from each other as the day differs from the night, for the elder brother was tall and fairhaired and born of a Russian princess, while the younger brother was swarthy, small, and the bastard son of a dark-skinned barbarian maiden.

As the boys grew up, to these bodily differences were added spiritual ones. For the elder brother was a dutiful son, who honored his parents and heeded his teachers and obeyed the laws of the land. After coming of age he traveled to the capital city and learned the ways of the imperial court and found favor in the eyes of the tsar.

Throughout European history the aristocracy has been involved in reform movements which undermined either ecclesiastical or monarchical power structures. Thus the nobles of southern France in the twelfth century granted protection to the Cathars, and in fourteenth-century England lords and knights offered aid to the Lollards. The support of German princes and knights for Lutheranism is well known, as is the instrumental role played by the French aristocracy in initiating the constitutional reforms which gave birth to that nation's eighteenth-century revolution. The fifteenth-century Hussite reform movement in Bohemia similarly received aid from the noble class. Here, when the Hussites were under attack in 1417 from the authorities, especially the archbishop, sympathetic lords protected Hussite priests on their domains.

This article turns to an unexplored genre of Russian letters—the Yiddish cartoon—in order to consider how the most popular Russian Jewish newspaper of the early twentieth century participated in the Revolution of 1905-07. By exploring cartoons published in Derfraynd (St. Petersburg, 1903-1913, renamed Dos lebn February-July 1906) Sarah Abrevaya Stein reflects on how the Yiddish press reflected and shaped evolutions in Russian Jewish popular opinion: in particular, the temporary shift away from nationalist and toward opposition and socialist politics. This article also considers why the revolution ended in the world of Yiddish letters some months earlier than it did in the Russian, in the wake of the Bialystok pogroms of June 1906. This event, Stein demonstrates, catalyzed a redirection in the aesthetic and political tenor of popular Yiddish sources, prompting the cartoon to be replaced with the photograph and the politics of opposition with nationalism.

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.

In 1920 the Polish army defeated the Bolsheviks before the gates of Warsaw. The Polish victory preserved the independence of the reborn state, delayed Russian expansion for a generation, and left to historians a number of controversial issues. Certainly the most passionately debated aspect of the war is the authorship of the Polish victory. Gradually western scholarship has come to credit the laurels to Poland's Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, but there are still those who emphasize the role of other Polish soldiers or of the Frenchman, General Maxime Weygand. From the midst of this historiographical controversy, we may discern the dim outlines of a simultaneous, yet obscured episode: the aborted political comeback of Ignacy Jan Paderewski. It is the purpose of this essay to reconstruct the latter against the background of the former.

The recently published correspondence of maxim gorky and leonid andreev reveals many hitherto hidden aspects of the relationship between these two writers. In a graphic way, the letters show the rise of this significant personal and literary friendship, the strains and stresses which led to a cooling of attitudes, and finally the vain efforts, especially on the part of Andreev, to keep alive a relationship doomed to failure.

Many basic features of Marxist ideology have an idealistic and equalitarian content. The Soviet Union, while certainly influenced by Marxist ideology, has steered a fairly pragmatic course in its economic policies. True, when faced with alternative methods of achieving an objective, the planners are more likely to choose, all other things being equal, that method which conforms more closely to accepted ideology. Should the alternatives differ substantially in potential effectiveness in achieving the given ends, however, the more effective is likely to be chosen even if it happens to be less acceptable in terms of ideology.

It is quite natural that the study of history in Latvia could not be established on a firm scientific basis before Latvia achieved its independence. As soon as the Latvian State University was founded in 1919, historical and archaeological departments were established in it. Young scientists were trained by their elder colleagues in all auxiliary sciences, such as paleography, diplomatics, sphragistics, numismatics, etc. A Committee for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments was created, which established in the vicinity of Riga an open-air museum, where certain ethnographically rare farm buildings, old wooden chapels, and other architectural antiques were placed. Other archaeological items not transferable to the open-air museum were taken over by the Committee and proclaimed of national importance, such as old Latvian burial pits and tombs, ritual oak trees, certain old Latvian castle mounds, ruins of castles of Latvian rulers of the early medieval era (such as: Tervete, Bauska, Koknese, Gercike), and numerous ruins of castles of the Prince-archbishop and the Livonian Order of the Terra Mariana (1207-1562).

“There’s a tsar in the world, a merciless tsar; / His name is—hunger!” These lines, taken from Nikolai A. Nekrasov’s poem “Zheleznaia doroga” (1864), serve as the epigraph for one of the most popular works of Russian revolutionary propaganda literature of the late nineteenth century, the pamphlet Tsar-golod by Aleksei Nikolaevich Bakh, a People’s Will activist of the early 1880s. Nekrasov’s poem vividly depicts the cost in human suffering of the construction of the Moscow to St. Petersburg railroad. As with other works by Nekrasov, the poem arouses the reader’s sympathy for Russian common folk and outrage at their plight. Bakh, when faced with the task of devising lessons for workers’ propaganda circles, picked up the striking image of Tsar Hunger, driving workers to labor and often to death, and used it as a recurring theme, while he transformed the message. Bakh’s brochure, a dissection and analysis of the capitalist system, leaves behind the world of poetry for that of cold reality. The author’s purpose is not simply to inspire sympathy for the people’s suffering, but also to lead his worker audience to understand the economic system that exploited them and to recognize the urgent need for revolution.