Contemporary political events in Poland provoke many questions concerning the old Polish intelligentsia. Has it survived the historical storms of the last thirty years? How potent is the value system of this stratum today? Has its dominating influence on the other strata remained, or does Poland now have a new value system derived from the goals and morals of a different class? The Polish intelligentsia can be analyzed from several standpoints–from the historical or the current perspective, in the light of its national function or its own structure, or as revealed in its aspirations and values. It is the conviction of the author that the value system determines the structure of both the spiritual and the material culture in every social class and stratum.

The major ideological challenge faced by Russian revolutionists in the half century prior to 1917 was to find a way to adapt the principal tenets of West European socialism to Russia. The difficulty of answering this challenge lay in Russia's unique historical development and the consequent differences between Russia and the West. The proper adaptation of socialism required an understanding of these differences and their significance.

General histories give little credence to the Utopian side of Lenin's revolutionary thought, especially in relation to his only formal Utopian work, State and Revolution. Most histories pass off that book as an “intellectual deviation” resulting from Lenin's “revolutionary fever” of 1917 or as a piece of political opportunism, while offering What Is To Be Done? as the statement of orthodox Leninism. In keeping with the tone of What Is To Be Done? Lenin is generally portrayed as the political realist par excellence, a pragmatist of the first order, a “hard-nosed” strategist confined by neither intellectual theories (not even Marxism) nor human emotions. This neat and simple formula is most convenient in attributing the success of the November Revolution to Lenin's talents for organization and political astuteness.

It is a settled principle of Soviet constitutional law that the USSR Supreme Soviet is the supreme representative organ, the supreme legislative body, and the supreme executor of the people's sovereignty. The 1936 Constitution subordinates all other organs of government to the Supreme Soviet, and it alone, on the national level, has the right to form governments, pass laws, and amend the Constitution. The Constitution also stipulates, however, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is “the vanguard of the workers in their struggle for the construction of a communist society and constitutes the guiding core of all workers’ organizations, public as well as governmental.”

Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov's letter of December 24, 1828 O.S. (January 5, 1829 N.S.) to his wife Nina has hitherto been considered his last extant piece of correspondence. The Manuscript Division of the University of Nottingham Library, however, has in its archives a copy of an unpublished Griboedov letter which now replaces the letter to Nina as his last surviving letter. It belongs to the final weeks of Griboedov's life, early February 1829. I found the letter among that portion of the Portland Papers which comprises the correspondence of Lord William Bentinck, governor general of India from 1828 to 1835. It was lying in a packet containing three other documents: a letter from Lieutenant Colonel John Macdonald, British envoy to Persia, to Sir John Malcolm, his brother-in-law and governor of Bombay; a letter from Sir John Malcolm to Lord William Bentinck; and an “Extract of Private Letter from Lt. Col. Macdonald to Sir John Malcolm.”

N. A. Dobroliubov's critical essays on Goncharov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, and Dostoevsky, written in the brief period of two years preceding his death in 1861, established a reputation and influence second only to Belinsky's in the history of Russian literary criticism. Of these essays “What Is Oblomovism?” holds particular interest. Published in the May 1859 issue of Nekrasov's Sovremennik (The Contemporary), it was Dobroliubov's first major review and possibly his best. It is a central document in the history of the conflict between the liberals of the 1840s and the radicals of the 1860s, or, in the phrasing of Turgenev's title, between “fathers and sons.”

Vladimir Nabokov's acrobatic disclaimers may often be safely qualified, and his strenuous self-estrangement from Gogol is no exception. Indeed, these two very different writers are surprisingly alike in many ways, ranging from a fondness for depicting poshlust to a deep preoccupation with painting. Parallels and parodies are of course mostly unlabeled. But perhaps more important than the artistic purpose behind Gogolisms in Nabokov is that the mechanisms of many similar effects are nearly identical. And uniquely so. Both writers frequently contrive very similar “reversal effects” that conduce to a sudden, fresh view of “reality” and, somewhat paradoxically, a simultaneous and unsettling awareness of human perceptual limitations.