Count Sergej Witte claims that the Holy Brotherhood (Svjashchennaja Druzhina) was his idea and he explains it in the following way. On the morrow of the assassination of Alexander II, he wrote a letter to his uncle Fadeev in which he expressed the opinion that the only way to vanquish terrorism was to appeal to counter-terrorism by means of a secret society. Witte at that time was in Kiev in charge of the Southwestern Railroad. In his answer Fadeev told his nephew that his letter was on the tsar's table and that Witte would soon be called to St. Petersburg. Indeed, a few days later Witte received the invitation to come and meet Count I. Voroncov-Dashkov, commander of the bodyguards of the Emperor in Gatchina.

Bohemia and English literature? Everybody who sees this title will instantly think of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the sea-coast of Bohemia there. But has Bohemia been a topic in English literature outside this one instance which is almost tragicomic? For what could be further from the reality of Bohemia than Antigonus’ question to the mariner:

However, Bohemian subject-matter, references and associations are quite numerous in English literature. A collection should throw light on the relations of the two countries: on the conceptions which Englishmen had of a fairly remote, land-locked country, the bits of information they picked up of its geography, history and people, the observations and impressions of English travellers, and the attitude of English writers to the Czech reformation, on their use of Czech names and legends. It will be best to begin with the dawn of history and bring the story down to the Battle of the White Mountain (1620) which submerged the Czech nation in the polyglot Empire of the Habsburgs for almost three hundred years.

Sometime in the late 1880's or early 1890's the following conversation took place between Emperor Alexander III and Countess Aleksandra Andreevna Tolstaja, the correspondent, confidante, and cousin of her illustrious namesake, Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj:

The Emperor. Tell me who you think are the most remarkable and popular persons in Russia. I know how honest you are and I am sure you will tell me the truth. Of course you mustn't think of including me in the list.

Countess Tolstaja (smiling). I won't include you.

The Emperor. But just whom will you include? That's what interests me.

Countess Tolstaja. First of all, Lev Tolstoj.

The Emperor. I expected that. Who else?

Countess Tolstaja (thinking). I'll name you one more person.

The Emperor (impatiently). But who is it? Who is it?

Countess Tolstaja. Father Ioann of Kronstadt.

The Emperor (laughs). I had forgotten about him. But I agree with you.

Although comprehensive economic data on the Russian economy during the period of the Crimean War are not available, there are some surprisingly complete series of data on prices in both internal and foreign trade. The implications that can be drawn from a study of changes in the price level cover a wide area, especially when they are studied in the light of earlier work on the monetary and fiscal problems of the period.

Nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals felt themselves cut off from the uneducated masses and thought the gap could be bridged by some form of harmo niouscivilization. In Russia, a new liberalism spread after 1811-15, when young Russian officers returned from Germany and France, and culminated in the December, 1825, uprising. Less political, but much more numerous and influential, were the young philosophers who discovered the old Greek authors, Voltaire, and Hegel.

In 1954 the Ossete Dzambulat Dzanty, an emigré living in France, communicated to me the text of the Ossetic tale (kadaeg) "Iry Dada." It is an historical tale describing the conflict between the Russians and the Ossetes, which had occurred in 1022. It also contains elements of heroic dirge. As Dzambulat Dzanty stated in the "Foreword" to "Iry Dada," he had heard this tale from an old Ossete reciter, Khulyx, in the village Bolshoe Osetinskoe in Mozdok area in 1910.

From about 1930 to 1950 linguistic work in the Soviet Union was dominated by the officially recognized theories and practices of the so-called Marr "school." For the most part, any but minor deviations from the theoretical foundations established by Nikolaj Ja. Marr (1865-1934) were severely suppressed. In 1950, however, Stalin officially repudiated Marr's theories and disbanded the group of linguists who had followed in his footsteps.

Iurii Lotman authored nearly forty books and articles about Aleksandr Pushkin's works, life, and personality; there is little doubt, therefore, that the poet was central to Lotman's scholarly interests. Nonetheless, Lotman turned to Pushkin's legacy relatively late in his scholarly career: while his first article was published in 1949, his first article on Pushkin appeared only in 1960. Both Lotman's kandidatskaia and doktorskaia dissertations were devoted to far more marginal figures and issues of Russian literary development: the former to Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Karamzin, and the latter to early nineteenth-century literature.

In his Pan-Slav treatise of 1837, On Literary Reciprocity Between the Different Branches and Dialects of the Slav Nation, Jan Kollár recommended that all educated Slavs ought to know the four principal Slavic “dialects”: Illyrian (Serbo-Croatian), Russian, Polish, and Czecho-Slovak. He thought that the scholar, however, should be able to use all the Slavic dialects, as well as the languages of the Slavs’ neighbors. But in a less frequently cited passage, in which he explained why his work was appearing in German, Kollar bemoaned the still limited knowledge of the various Slavic idioms, even among so-called learned Slavs: “When one wishes to make himself understood on any important matter to brother Slavs, he must use a foreign, non-Slavic tongue.”

On January 21, 1920, a man named Ernst Barth stood up in Germany's Supreme Court at Leipzig to hear sentence passed upon him. The charge was “Attempted Treason”; the verdict, guilty; his punishment to be three years’ detention in a fortress. A tragic and now all but forgotten episode, the effort made to secure national rights for the Lusatian Sorbs at the Paris Peace Conference, had ended, in a German courtroom.

Tragic this episode surely was. In postwar years a small Slavic community in Germany found itself the object of bitter suspicion which had not existed before. “Die wendische Gefahr“—“The Wendish Danger“—found a place among the less felicitous journalistic cliches employed in the Weimar Republic. For more than a few Germans after 1918 the word “Wend” summoned up an image of treacherous men conspiring to tear yet another province from the prostrate Reich.

The kolkhozy are rural associations based on the principles of coöperative management, public ownership of the principal means of production, collective labor, annual planning of production, and remuneration for labor based upon the socialist dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” They are now in the second phase of their development. During the first phase, which ended approximately in 1939-40, the Soviet authorities were concerned primarily with grouping individual peasants into coöperative enterprises. Eighteen and a half million peasant families were united into 242,000 agricultural coöperatives (artels) comprising a total of 488,000,000 hectares (1,205,000,000 acres) of land.

The world-wide struggle over petroleum that was carried on in the period between the first World War and the second World War occupies a significant place in the chronicle of Soviet-Western relations. Soviet oil was a prize as well as a contestant in this struggle and was deeply involved in the controversies over control of oil resources and markets that created so deep a rift in international relations in the interwar years. The facts in the case provide a striking illustration of the power of oil as a source of international friction. The quarrels which are here resurrected were composed in due time, and differences were reconciled. But the old struggle over oil has been revived in a new setting and is again contributing its share of suspicion to the troubled international scene.

The first World War and its aftermath saw a fundamental change in the world petroleum situation. Oil had emerged as a vital factor in military strategy and an eagerly sought-after fuel, demanded in ever greater quantities by a motorized world. As a result, the international oil groups redoubled their efforts to acquire control over the most promising foreign sources of production.

In the summer of 1812, through the efforts of Bettine Brentano, a meeting took place in Teplitz between Beethoven and Goethe. Beethoven describes it in a letter to Bettine:

Liebe gute Bettine! Könige und Füirsten können wohl Professoren machen und Geheimeräthe &. und Titel und Ordensbänder umhängen, aber groβe Menschen können sie nicht machen, Geister, die über das Weltgeschmeib hervorragen, das müssen sie wohl bleiben lassen zu machen, und damit muβ man sie in Respect halten; wenn so zwei zusammen kommen, wie ich und der Goethe, da müssen auch grobe Herren merken, was bei unser Einem als groβ gelten kann.

Eastern Orthodoxy, unlike Roman Catholicism, is organized on the principle of autocephalous national churches—each constituting an independent administrative entity. This fundamental difference between Eastern and Western Christianity causes the thinking Orthodox Christian to be confronted with a dilemma. He wants the Church to be close to the communicant and the clergy to teach him and pray in his own language, and yet if he desires that the whole Church be able to perpetuate itself and propagate the faith, he must grant to it a sufficiently centralized organization and at the same time combat all fissiparous tendencies. Thus, on the surface at least, there appears to be a conflict between Christ's injunction that there be “one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16) and the actual establishment of national churches which can easily render unto Caesar what may be correctly regarded as “things that are God's“ ( Matthew 22:21).

The question before us is to what stage of social and economic development—or, to borrow a term from geology, to what socio-political formation—Kievan Russia belongs.

Chronologically, as we know, the Kievan period included the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries. Those three centuries witnessed the rise and blossoming of feudal institutions in western and central Europe; they represent what may be called the feudal age par excellence. It seems only natural that one should be inclined to place Kievan Russia in the same category and characterize its sociopolitical regime as feudal. Yet until recently Russian historians have been reluctant to do so. They did not raise any definite objections to the study of feudalism in Russia: they simply ignored the problem.

This article explores Aleksandr Herzen's use of the lovesickness topos in his novel Kto vinovat? (1847) in the context of the long literary and medical traditions of lovesickness and the specifically Russian situation of the 1840s. Valeria Sobol argues that Herzen was among the first Russian writers to exploit the semiotics and diagnostics of lovesickness in order to address the questions of human spirituality and the status of scientific knowledge. Given Herzen's frequentiy proclaimed antispiritualist and antidualist position and the novel's apparent anti-Romantic pathos, one would expect him to reject the essentially dualist notion of lovesickness as a “malady of the soul,” but the novel presents a far more complex picture. Herzen's struggle to reconcile the new scientific spirit of his age with the Romantic heritage reflects the transitional nature of the decade in which the novel was written.