The “thaw” slips farther back into History. Displaced from our attention by the renewed obscurantism, those heady days are seldom studied any more. This is unfortunate. For, it seems to me, it is particularly now, as a counter to the broadening repression, that we should gather and preserve the achievements of that hopeful decade. It is in this vein that I want to go back to the period and recall a dramatic and brilliant expression of the liberal, “thaw” spirit, as well as a splendid contribution to the rich gallery of Russian Aesopian polemics: Soviet Shakespeare criticism and, especially, the revival of sound and insightful commentaries on Hamlet by Soviet critics and playwrights.

Fedor Dostoevskii was at least as great and ingenious a renovator of old forms as he was a creator of the revolutionary new form, the polyphonic novel. However fond Dostoevskii may have been of old, often "outdated" modes and genres, he never accepted or used them as he found them; rather he seems to have been attracted to them primarily for the possibilities they offered for literary experimentation. Often overlooked, at least in this regard, is Dostoevskii's great semiautobiographical novel Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma. Perhaps in no other work did Dostoevskii perform as daring a literary experiment in the renewal of an "outmoded" genre–in this case, the religious autobiography. Lev Tolstoi, who himself, according to Prince Dmitrii Mirsky, years later wrote a confession on a par with the Book of Job, thought Zapiski the best thing that Dostoevskii ever did, and one of the greatest Christian works of its time. Uplifting, universal, and "infectious," Zapiski iz Mertvogo doma met all of Tolstoi's criteria for great art.

In May, 1926, the retired First Marshal of Poland and former Chief of State (1918-22), Józef Piłsudski, at the head of certain military units devoted to his person and with the enthusiastic approval of the political and social forces of the Polish Left, staged a successful coup d'etat against the Polish parliamentary system dominated since the elections of November, 1922, by an agglomeration of Right-Center political parties. Though on the morrow of his victory Pitsudski moved swiftly and effectively to avert the devolution of his coup into a genuine social or even political revolution—to the consternation and disappointment of his allies on the Left—the May, 1926, crisis nevertheless became the great watershed of Polish political life between the two world wars. It signaled the failure and death of parliamentary democracy throughout the area of East Central Europe, and its divisions have run deep within Polish political memories to this day.