In the nearly one hundred days between the murder of Alexander Pavlovich's father, Paul I, on the night of March 11-12, 1801, and the fall of Count Peter von der Pahlen, the leader of the conspiracy, on June 17, Alexander recovered from his initial demoralization and formed the paternalist political conceptions that would guide the next twenty-five years of his reign.

The relationship between Pushkin and his critics has been a subject of considerable interest and discussion since the poet's own time. Belinsky made it the focus of the introduction to his series of essays on Pushkin. The early biographers provided some further information, and scholarly attention dates from the 1889 monograph by S. S. Trubachev, Pushkin v russkoi kritike, 1820-1880, which appeared shortly after V. A. Zelinsky had published, between 1887 and 1889, his extremely useful anthology of Pushkin criticism. The monograph is little more than a pedestrian rehearsal of reviews, digressing only to promulgate such myths as Pushkin's “aristocratic” attitude toward critics, but it remains valuable as a catalogue of criticism. Thereafter, both before the Revolution and during the Soviet period, the relevant published material becomes too extensive to list here. Recent comprehensive treatments of the subject may be found in N. I. Mordovchenko's Russkaia kritika pervoi chetverti XIX veka (1959) and in the Academy publication Pushkin: Itogi i problemy izucheniia (1966).

Vladimir Mayakovsky, who knew hardly a word of English, once upbraided his friend Kornei Chukovsky for his “too confectionized” (chereschur bonbon'-erochno) rendering of Walt Whitman into Russian. Chukovsky, it seems, was deeply impressed by Mayakovsky's instinctive feel for Whitman's rugged diction. Ever since, Chukovsky has detected in the Russian poet's verse the permanent impress of the American “kosmos.” This notion, propagated by the translator in numerous places, has fully infiltrated both Western and Soviet scholarship on Mayakovsky. In a recent philological study, Vera Timofeeva has suggested that Mayakovsky's anthropocentrism and his flair for concrete metaphors are a direct legacy from Whitman. And Helen Muchnic, following up a clue from Chukovsky, has referred to Chelovek (Man) as “a Whitmanesque poem,” though admitting that it lacks somewhat the “geniality” of the “Good Gray Poet.” Such remarks perpetuate a rather loose impressionism. Chelovek, as we shall later observe, is hardly a “Whitmanesque poem.“

For forty eventful years, ending with the outbreak of the First World War, the Young Czech Party waged an unremitting struggle on behalf of Czech national interests within the limited constitutional framework of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Political activity for such a span of time would be enough to insure the party a niche in history, but in addition it dominated Czech politics for sixteen of those years and enlisted politicians of the caliber of Kaizl, Kramář, Rašín, and briefly Masaryk under its banner in their quest for elective office. The intent of this article is to evaluate the party's contributions to the development of the modern Czech political system by outlining its history and general orientation and by comparing party platforms with achievements.

On October 29, 1918, at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was fast approaching dissolution, a Slovak National Council met in Turčianský Svätý Martin to consider two possible alternatives for the Slovak people: autonomy within a Hungarian state or union with the Czechs in a Czechoslovak state. The Slovak leaders decided on the latter. The next day the so-called Turciansky Svätý Martin Declaration was issued, which not only accepted the principle of union with the Czechs but also supported the so-called Czechoslovak thesis. The declaration stated among other things that “the Slovak nation is part of the Czecho-Slovak nation united as much from the linguistic as the cultural and historical point of view.” On the surface everything appeared settled, since responsible Slovak leaders, including the highly respected and admired Slovak patriot Father Andrej Hlinka, were the principal architects of the October 30 declaration.