Feudalism is difficult to define. One may follow the example of Marc Bloch by stressing what feudalism is not. Clearly the feudal patterns which various scholars have described are always subject to the objection that some available data do not fit. Indeed, this defect is inherent in virtually any attempt to generalize.

However, because scholars have asserted that feudalism existed in sixteenth-century Lithuania, it is of interest to ascertain whether their assertions are reasonably accurate under the more common criteria for determining the existence of feudalism. I have come to the conclusion that when judged by those criteria, the social and political order of sixteenth-century Lithuania may not be regarded as typical feudalism except from a Marxist point of view. I am inclined to regard the early sixteenth century as a period when tendencies were developing which point, rather, in the direction of a dynastic state.

In a recent memoir Iurii Olesha, one of the most sophisticated Soviet prose writers, recalls a conversation he once had with V. E. Meyerhold regarding a film version of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons which the famous avant-garde director was then contemplating. “I asked him whom he had in mind for the part of Bazarov. He answered, ‘Mayakovsky'.“

The resemblance between one of modern Russia's foremost poets and Turgenev's harshly antipoetic hero may not be immediately obvious. Yet a close look at Mayakovsky's poetry, especially at his earlier, Futurist lyrics, reveals the presence of what might be called the Bazarov syndrome. The tenor of these Surrealist urban still-lives (“Night,“ “Morning,” “The Street,” etc.), these impassioned lyrical manifestoes (“I,” “Man,” “A Cloud in Trousers“), is total negation of the status quo.

In the eighteenth and more particularly in the nineteenth century, Russia enjoyed a reputation for unusually strong currents of religious spirituality. Most frequently these mystical currents have been traced to peculiarly native traditions, such as the Eastern patristic literature and the “naturally” mystical bent of the Russian mind. The influence of Western mysticism has been minimized, if not entirely overlooked. Actually, Western mysticism and theosophy were eagerly absorbed in Russia by religiously oriented thinkers from the reign of Peter the Great on into the era of romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Finally, Western mystical sources provided the chief inspiration for the leading theologian and philosopher in late nineteenth-century Russia, Vladimir Soloviëv (1853-1900), whose thought in turn had a decisive impact on the intellectual currents of the so-called Silver Age of Russian culture before World War I.

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.