The repertoire of the leading Yugoslav theaters before the war concentrated on domestic works which reflected the main trends of modern dramatic presentation. Representative playwrights dealt successfully not only with the modern revolt against the conventionalized features of dramatic art, but also with the effort to raise it to a powerful medium chronicling and analyzing the basic trends in the complex social milieu of the present day.

Interest among the Slovenes in English literature dates back to the Age of Enlightenment (1765–1810). During this period the Jansenist and biblical scholar Jurij Japelj (1744–1807) chose Alexander Pope's moralistic-didactic poetry for translation. Later, we find J. N. Primic (1785-1823), a Graz professor, publishing in 1812 a translation of Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. Both of these used German texts.

As part of a study of the treatment accorded the Soviet Union in the Social Studies program of the American secondary school, a test was given in the spring of 1945 to approximately 2,500 high school seniors enrolled in social studies courses. The purpose of the test was to discover how much significant knowledge about the Soviet Union was possessed by high school seniors. While Dean Philip J. Rulon of the Harvard Graduate School of Education was kind enough to advise the author in the preparation of the test, he is of course, not responsible for any errors in procedure or in interpretation of the test results.

In his account of the military organization of the Turks (= Magyars), the Byzantine Emperor Leo the Sage repeatedly compares the Magyars with the Bulgarians, and in doing so emphasises that the customs of the Magyars differed from those of the Bulgarians only in so far as the latter had embraced the Christian religion and, adapting themselves to Byzantine morals, had abandoned both their savage and nomadic characteristics and their paganism. By this he alludes to the fact, on the one hand, that the Bulgarian prince Boris and his people had become Christians as early as 864, which means that they had merged in the community of Christian peoples, and to the negative fact, on the other hand, that the Magyars, whom he had come to know during the war in 894-95 but who, at the time of his work was written (between 904-912), were already living in their present country, had not as yet been converted.

Written in Wilno, probably in the year 1819, but omitted from Mickiewicz's first published Poems, 1 and 11, 1822 and 1823. For full account of the poem's origin, see A. P. Coleman, “Mickiewicz and Northern Balladry,” Slavonic and East European Review, xx (1941), 179-181.

From the time of Marco Polo to that of Vasco da Gama, no great eastern voyage, of which we possess a full record, has received less attention here than the gallant Athanasius Nikitin's journey from Russia “across three seas” to Persia, India, and back. Indeed, in not a single book on Russia, written in English, that the present writer has seen, was a mention, let alone a description, of Nikitin's voyage to be found. This is all the more regrettable, as a translation of his report has actually been published in English, in volume XXII of the Works issued by the Hakluyt Society (R. H. Major, editor; London, 1857). However, this translation is almost one hundred years old, and does not live up to the minimum requirements of up to date scholarship.

Were one to confess total ignorance concerning an alleged tie between the Ballades of Chopin and the poetry of his friend-compatriot Adam Mickiewicz, he would be forever ostracized from among musical conoscenti. Only slightly less flagrant an offense would be the omission of Schumann or perhaps Liszt as reported go-betweens. But, while accord has been reached on the poems which provided Chopin with his musical imagery, even Chopin scholars (Karasowski, Ganche, Bidou, Binental, Hadden) would be at a loss to trace the list down to its origins. Yet, so meaty is the whole, so plausible on the surface, so brimming with national-patriotic-romantic potentialities, that each and every Chopinite has succumbed to its lure, varying solely the stress on this or that facet and the reserve brought to bear on it.

The status of social organization and primitive government among the Eastern Slavs at the dawn of their history is not definable with complete certainty, but may best be determined by comparing the data preserved both by the earliest native sources and in the accounts of contemporary foreign observers with survivals of early custom and usage among the modern branches of the Slavic race least touched by the inroads of modern culture. Accurate definition of early Eastern Slavic social organization has, however, been gravely hampered by the dubious terminology of the mediaeval Russian sources themselves and particularly by the ambiguous use of the word rod, which is indiscriminately employed by eleventh and twelfth century texts to mean family, clan, tribe, and even nation.

A few years before the last World War, an event of outstanding interest took place in the literary circles of Paris. This was the publication of part of Turgenev's posthumous works. For half a century these had remained hidden in the family of the famous French opera star Pauline Viardot. Among other valuable items, they contained one of Turgenev's most inspired pages—his farewell greeting to the beloved woman, full of tender love and passion, which he wrote before his death and which she was to read after her friend should be no more. This pathetic greeting recalls the almost forgotten story of Turgenev's tragic love for Pauline Viardot, developing from selfish passion to supreme sacrifice and closing with the pathetic message from the dead.

In my study on Pushkin, “Poetry of Marriage and the Hearth,” I attempted to show that certain motives in the many-sided, yet pre-eminently lyric and autobiographic poetry of Pushkin express, indeed ground and affirm, the poet's view of absolute truths and the laws which derive from these truths and, in the poet's opinion, govern man's life inexorably, beyond possibility of any compromise. One such law which in the poetic (and, although of less importance, also in the practical) concepts of Pushkin had just such a religious, imperative significance, admitting of no modification and no reduction, was the principle of the inviolability of marriage.

Russian literary jubilees have always been events of the highest importance — dates significant not merely for students of literature, not alone for the historians of Russian culture, but for Russian culture itself. A sum total of the studies devoted to the fêted writers is cast up, gaps are industriously filled in, wide circles of society are once again, and more persistently, associated with the classical heritage, but most important — the author whose memory is celebrated is reappraised in the light of the present time and this latter is in its turn subjected to judgment in the light of the writer's legacy.

In the 1880's, France “discovered” Russian literature. In this period appeared a large number of translations from Russian writers, and numerous articles about Russian authors were published in various magazines and reviews. In the mid-1880's, two books came out whose purpose was to familiarize the French reader with the masters of Russian literature. Ernest Dupuy's Les Grands Maîtres de la Littérature Russe du 19me siecle was published in 1885. Dupuy gives no more than a resumé of biographical facts concerning Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoi, with a brief summary of some of their novels. Although the book is titled “The Great Masters of Russian Literature in the 19th Century,” Dostoyevski is not even mentioned. Dupuy's book was nevertheless reprinted several times.

However often I come in contact with the works of Józef Tretiak on Pushkin, I am invariably struck by the special acuteness and the frequently remarkable intuition of our celebrated scholar. Not always, however, do I find myself in agreement with the final results of his investigations and the inferences he draws from the subject-matter of his researches. Most often, a true instinct has led Tretiak in a just and proper direction, but not always to the goal. It has seemed as though he did not reach the end of the road, but at a certain point suddenly stopped or swerved aside and deviated from his proper destination.

The star of Vladimir Mayakovski is today in its zenith. Has he not recorded, outdistancing in pointedness, dynamism and intensity any Soviet bard, every phase of the gigantic transition from Tsarist defeatism to intoxication with power? His stock-theme, namely, man reclaiming the earth from its self-imposed lords, he has bedizened with an unmatched breath of registers from literacy, birth-control, coal, radio, tractors and aircraft down to manners, cleanliness, diet and dress.

In considering the literary works of Schiller, one is confronted by the unusual phenomenon of having before him what seems at first to be no less than three separate personalities: the writer of the four youthful plays, the lyric poet, and the great dramatist of the years from 1799-1805. Upon closer study, to be sure, a definite unity of purpose and of temperament is revealed. But it is not at all surprising that his contemporaries and the generation which immediately followed him were some times at a loss to know just where to place him. Schiller's untimely death in 1805 interrupted a fertile creative period which the poet himself would in all likelihood have regarded as but the beginning of yet another excursion into new fields, and he could hardly have been happy to know that at the hour of his death the vanguard of Russian literati, almost wholly unaware of his major works, mourned him as the poet of Die Räuber and Don Carlos.

The village of Prąadnik, on the River Nida, a left-bank tributary of the Vistula not far from Kraków, has been called “The Polish Urbino,” as it was here that Lukasz Górnicki (1572-1603) placed the scene of his Dworzanin, a work based on Castiglione' celebrated handbook of manners, The Courtier, the scene of which was, of course, the Italian Urbino.

The influence of America upon the thought of Peter Lavrov, the great Narodnik sociologist of the late nineteenth century, has hitherto been overlooked in any serious study of his life and work. It was the American labor movement, above all, which interested Lavrov — an interest which not only harmonized with his intransigent views on the “economic question,” but one which coincided, appropriately enough, with the decade that witnessed Lavrov's closest approach to Marxism.

In Lavrov's journal V pered, for example, there was always a section devoted to a Chronicle of the Labor Movement and also one to a Chronicle of Struggle. These two features were carried to report the positive constructive elements in the working class struggle and to contrast these with “the chaos of bourgeois civilization.” In these reports on the state of the world labor movement, the progress of the American working class had a prominent place.

The sparrow's song within the thor
Our Lord doth welcome, newly born.
The titmouse twitters tsin-tsin-tsin,
For mankind redeemed from sin.
Triumphant is the magpie's cry
That the fiend of hell must die.
The lonely owl's oo-oo-oo
Sings the Saviour's praises too.
For our simple rhyme and verse,
A penny each, Sir, from your purse.
May God your kindness, Sir, repay,
His Grace hell-fires keep away.

The first parties of colonists set out for North America as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. They counted on finding gold there, as well as in Central America.

But they were disappointed. On the Atlantic coast of North America they found no gold at this time.

It went hard for the first settlers. Many died of malaria and tropical diseases, and some had to return again to Europe.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, most colonies in North America belonged to the British; the British first expelled the Dutch, then the French. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam was taken by the British in 1664. This colony was given to the Duke of York, the brother of the English king, and named New York.