Music and Poetry have been closely linked together throughout the ages in the cultural development of every nation. The interweaving of music and verse is especially clear in the history of Russian civilisation. This is even more true with regard to Old Russia, Russia of the byliny and the folksongs, than of Modern Russia, the Russia of instrumental music and songs. While modern Russian verse is tonic and, in some cases, syllabic, the old folk verse may be called metric, if it could be placed in any category of conventional theory of versification at all. In fact the old Russian folk verse is inseparable from music; it is not poetry in any conventional sense, but song, the rhythm of words being completely merged in it with the rhythm of music. Logos is here controlled by melos and ruled by the latter's laws, and vice versa. The proverb, “you cannot omit a word from a song” (“ïz pesni slova ne vykineš”) is characteristic indeed in this connection. I recollect well from the memories of my youth how carefully peasant singers in Russia tried to reproduce the words of a song with utmost accuracy, the omission of a word being equal to a sacrilege, so firm was the old tradition of a complete harmony of verse and music established in the people's minds and ears.

Works of broad historical synthesis have been rare in all periods and all countries. Modern Russian historiography is not an exception. Among the Russian historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, only three names can be cited as coming under this head: Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevski. And of these three Klyuchevski occupies a position which is, in a sense, unique. Karamzin, the “Columbus of Russian history” as Pushkin has called him, discovered that subject for the general reader to whom he appealed more than to the specialists in the field. By no means a mere dilettante, as he has been so often pictured, he still was primarily a great literary artist, and only in the second place a scholar. His importance lay more in the field of general Russian culture than in that of historical scholarship. On the contrary, Solovyov has remained essentially a historian for historians. Devoid of literary brilliance, and lacking in architectonic ability, he has left us the twenty-nine volumes of his History of Russia from the Earliest Times, to be consulted with the help of the index rather than to be read through and enjoyed. Both the size and the arrangement of his monumental work have given it a somewhat forbidding nature. For a casual reader his general conception of Russian history is hidden behind the mass of detailed material, for the most part presented in a strictly chronological order. Of the three masters of Russian historiography, Klyuchevski alone combines a great literary skill, rivaling that of Karamzin, with profound scholarship, not inferior to that of Solovyov; hence his simultaneous and equally powerful appeal to the general reader and the specialist.

That it was Peter the Great who introduced tobacco into Russia on a large scale is well known, but the details of this early commerce in what the Russians called “nicotine” are less familiar — for instance, that the tobacco imported was American, that the initiative in opening the trade came largely from America, and that the fulfillment of the contracts became involved in complications that at times approached the burlesque.

There was of course a considerable amount of tobacco consumed in Russia long before the time of Peter. It is true that the use of the “abomination to God” was forbidden by the Orthodox Church on the Biblical grounds that it is not that which entereth into a man that defileth him, but that which proceedeth from him. However, among the foreigners, especially the Germans and the Dutch, and to some extent even among court officials, tobacco was openly smoked in the early sixteen hundreds to such a degree that under Michael Romanov it became necessary to forbid both Russians and foreigners to possess or to “drink” tobacco, or to buy or sell it under pain of death and confiscation of property, a decree to this effect being issued in 1634. Michael's heir, Alexei, was a staunch conservative who frowned upon foreign ways, repeated Michael's anti-tobacco legislation in his Ulozhenie or law code, and even after his quarrel with the Patriarch Nikon continued to uphold the conduct prescribed by the Church.

Russian scholars have long recognized the interest and importance of the Russian intellectual movement of the 1860's. Several excellent books, and many valuable articles, have been devoted to the subject. The agrarian socialism of Chernyshevski, for example, or the nihilism of Pisarev have been fairly well treated.

It is surprising that almost no attention has been paid to the reactions of the Russian radicals of the period of great reforms to the problems incident to the development of factory industry. A study of this question can contribute to our understanding of more than one aspect of Russian social thought. It will help to explain the populist socialism of the 1870's, and it will shed light on the problem of the extraordinary receptivity of Russian intellectuals to the ideas of Karl Marx.

The official count of all non-Russian natives of Siberia stood in 1911 at 2,212,100. They ranged all the way from roaming, hunting and fishing tribes having no written language and numbering less than a thousand individuals to the numerous Kirghiz, Yakuts, and Buriats who were ramified into sub-tribes, and possessed tribal self-government and codes of law even under the Empire.

The intentions of the Provisional Government with regard to all non-Russians in the country were, of course, thoroughly democratic and equalitarian. Beyond such intentions, however, the Provisional Government, harassed with life-and-death problems as it was, left the initiative and the work to others. The active championship of the non-Russian nationalities’ new rights was taken up by themselves, by Russian political parties and, in Siberia, largely by the Siberian autonomists — or, to use the Russian term, regionalists.

Information on Soviet public finances after the start of the war is scant. However, the Union budget approved by the Supreme Soviet in its session of February 26–March 1, 1941, gives us a clue as to how the financing of the present war would be met. As it will be seen later on, the budget approved in that session is actually a war-time budget.

First of all, one is impressed with the rapid growth of Soviet revenues and expenditures. In the table that follows figures quoted are those of the realized budgets except for 1941 which represent estimates.

Despite the political and economic insignificance of Poland in the international arena during the century and more of her political eclipse, a spiritual struggle went on within the Polish nation which was all the more intense for lack of practical and material avenues of expression. In the sharp focal point of Stefan Żeromski's novels, short-stories, and sociological pamphlets there is concentrated the pain, the despair, the sacrifice, and the triumphant exultation of the whole period during which Poland struggled up out of bondage into a “brave new world” of freedom.

From the point of view of content, therefore, Stefan Żeromski is without question one of the most interesting and important Polish writers of the last fifty years. His works identify themselves so closely with the struggle of Poland for freedom and for social justice within that freedom that they are a veritable mirror of the historical events, the ideological currents, and the intellectual and emotional attitudes swaying the whole generation of Poles who lived to see their disembodied nation take on the flesh of statehood.

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.

In Southeastern Europe the zadruga, or communal multiple family, has long held a central place in peasant life and, especially during its decline in recent decades, many controversies have been waged around it. While no single definition embraces all varieties of zadrugas, for present purposes the zadruga may be described as “a household composed of two or more biological or small-families, closely related by blood or adoption, owning its means of production communally, producing and consuming its means of livelihood jointly, and regulating the control of its property, labor, and livelihood communally.” The growth of an exchange-economy, the displacement of peasant custom by the written law of the jurists and of the more individualistic town, the spread of new rules of dowry and inheritance, have contributed to break down the zadruga in many regions of the Balkans. Naturally, the question has been asked whether the zadruga can survive.

Note: This article summarizes the result of a part of the author's research in the economic history of the Serbian lands and the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik). The work was begun in Yugoslavia in 1938 and then continued, with interruptions, in England and the United States. It is the special aim of the author to investigate documents and reconstruct the commercial history of Ragusa during the period of the Commercial Revolution, principally the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in connection with the discoveries and the colonization of America. It is almost unknown that Ragusa was one of the principal commercial and naval powers in the period 1510–1667 and that it played an important role in the history of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the West Indies in general. The same goes for England, the Netherlands, Spain, and other regions. The author will center his work around three regions in which the role of Ragusan commerce and navigation was of extreme importance: (a) Spain and America, (b) England and the Netherlands, and (c) the Levant and the East Indies.

For Bulgarians the decade preceding the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 was a period of feverish activity along two principal lines. One, centering in Constantinople, was primarily cultural: its object the wresting of ecclesiastical independence from a reluctant Porte and a still more reluctant Greek Patriarch, together with a far-reaching program of intellectual and educational propaganda in preparation for political independence. The other school of thought and action, focused in Bucharest with branches in other Bulgarian emigré centers such as Odessa and Belgrad, was impatient and scornful of the cautious Constantinopolitans; its avowed object was immediate political liberation, to be achieved through revolutionary risings in Bulgaria, with or without outside help. The seeming docility and “loyalty” of the evolutionists exasperated the followers of Rakovski, Karavelov, and Levski. On the other hand, the rashness of the revolutionists shocked the party led by Slaveikov, Tsankov, and Burmov, who were in a better position to appreciate the risks and the need for solid preliminary groundwork.

In this essay no distinction will be made between humor and the comic spirit. While, no doubt, the form and content of humor is apt to bring to the listener or reader results differing from those of any expression of the comic spirit, the inherent differences only then become conspicuous when the social and individual causes of both prevent them from being integrated. In judging things sub specie aeternitatis humor is apt to equalize differences, and the comic spirit is apt to emphasize contrasts. The representational attribute of humor in relation to the intention of understanding is a certain innocence of the spirit, confidence, sometimes credulity; that of the comic strain answers those demands of human insight which should be considered as correlatives of man's complicated nature. Nevertheless, the distance between humor and comedy can be shortened when the latter is willing to be less critical and the former less innocent. To be sure, this approach does not aim to improve the understanding of the psychology of humor and of the comic spirit; but it aims to simplify issues which since Kant have sometimes been unduly magnified in their oppositions.