It was a wintry evening in 1911. The weekly Wednesday gathering at the “tower”, the residence of the erudite poet Vyacheslav Ivanov, was in full swing. Here was represented the flower of the St. Petersburg poetical world. Poets well established, those less established, and the beginners recited in turn and awaited the verdict of the host. Usually this verdict was politely deadly. The sentence thus pronounced was mitigated only by the realization that it was always to the point and always just. Hence even the slightest approval was a triumph for the victim.

Russian Eastward expansion, which played a major role in shaping the destinies of the Russian people and in creating the largest contiguous land empire in the world, began at the dawn of Russian history. The great Asiatic expansion of the Muscovite period which brought the Russians to the shore of the Pacific Ocean was preceded by centuries of eastward advance in European Russia. In the beginning of Russian history, two Russian principalities, Novgorod and Rostov-Suzdal, were engaged in exploring, conquering, exploiting, and colonizing the area west of the Ural Mountains. A study of their colonial activities not only furnishes some of the background of later spectacular Asiatic expansion, but also throws light on the relations between these two early states within the framework of medieval Russia.

The Novgorodian colonial expansion was directed toward the northeastern corner of European Russia, into the vast region stretching from Lake Onega to the Ural Mountains and from the northern tributaries of the Volga to the Arctic Ocean. Among the Russians, the Novgorodians were the first to penetrate this region. Anxious to obtain commodities which they could use in their trade with Western Europe, they were aided in their quest by the northern system of rivers and portages.

Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749–1802) was one of the most versatile and talented figures of his age. He retains to this day an honored place in the history of Russian philosophy, biography, poetry, political and economic thought. In 1766 Catherine the Great sent him with a group of Russian students to study at Leipzig University. One of his teachers there was the renowned jurist Karl Ferdinand Hommel (1722–81) who did so much to popularize the theories of Beccaria in Germany. Radishchev at this time became interested in such works as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably's Droit public de l'Europe (1748), Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des lois, and Rousseau's Du Contrat social, all of which exercised an important influence on his political outlook.

On his return to Russia he held for a short time a minor post in the Senate, a body invested at this period with preponderantly judicial powers, without any effective voice in politics and legislation. The Senate was interested neither in Western theories of reform nor, as contemporary records show, in efficient and impartial administration of justice, and Radishchev soon resigned. Subsequently, he became an official in the Commerce Collegium and rose to the responsible position of director of the St. Petersburg Customs House. This work, however, could not satisfy his reformist zeal.

If a Polish Tennyson were to appear, intent on composing a Polish Idylls, the maiden he would have to choose from the national gallery for his “lily-maid” Elaine would be the one bearing the simple but euphonious name Wanda. Similarly, if some Polish Shakespeare were to arise, and if he were to undertake the writing of a Polish Lear, he too would have to use this Wanda, in the role of the third daughter Cordelia. At the same time, the Polish writer seeking a figure in his nation's past akin to the Englishman's Boadicea would likewise be obliged to turn to this very Wanda. For in the Polish Wanda, as she has come to be enshrined in the national vocabulary, are to be found the qualities of mind and heart for which each of these three characters, so familiar and so different, are famous: here we have the pure white chastity of Elaine and the filial devotion of Cordelia; here also the Amazonian sternness and manly vigor of the iron-willed Boadicea.

For a long time critics and readers were inclined to evaluate women writers in a more or less patronizing manner. It was said that women, though keyed to creative expression, should not reveal too much of their feelings and idiosyncrasies in the presence of the public. Furthermore, it was stated that the literary work of most women writers is unsubstantial, hence there should not be the slightest doubt that nature endowed them with insufficient creative ability. Rousseau in Emile says that the whole instruction of women ought to be relative to men to make them happy; a desirable point of view, but it certainly limits the scope of feminine activity. To be sure, Balzac in his letters called George Sand “my dear George” which, however, did not signify a recognition of equal attainments in the realm of fiction, but the expressed and somewhat ironic awareness of a literary person who happened to be a woman and enjoyed dressing as a man. One cannot brush aside the fact that in an atmosphere filled with the illusion and delusion of masculine superiority and influenced by literary misogynists, there was little opportunity for the objective estimation of women writers and their works. Only in relatively recent times could one observe a departure from such critical uneasiness and one-sided judgment.

The Lookout at the citadel perched above Trieste had trained a long telescope on the squadron of ships beating up the bay under full sail. Despite the clear light of the Adriatic summer morning, the lookout's practiced eye was unable to make out as yet the design and the colors of the flags flying from the gaffs of the large frigates he was observing. But even at that distance he could clearly see the prominent steeving of their bowsprits, and that the masts were set at nearly equal distances. He gave another look to the small squadron, and went to make his report to the corporal on duty.

Soon the rigid arms of the citadel's telegraph began to wigwag jerkily to the batteries on the mole the message that three Russian frigates of Count Voinovitch's squadron were making for the harbor. These ships were well known at Trieste, as they had refitted there during the stormy months of the preceding winter of 1799–1800. The squadron was then assigned to the task of blockading from the sea the fortress of Ancona, occupied by a French garrison. It also helped the raw Italian levies, which besieged Ancona from land, under the command of general Lahoz, whose troops were reinforced by a few hundred Russian and Turkish marines and seamen.

Among the chief landmarks of pre-war Kiev prior to the demolition of the structure in 1935-37 was the mediaeval but much-restored cathedral of St. Michael. This edifice was conspicuously situated northeast of St. Sophia near the edge of a bluff overlooking the lower city, and its gilded cupolas caused the institution around it to be known as the Monastery of St. Michael with the Golden Domes (Zlatoverkho-Mikhailovsky Monastyr').

One Might say of Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevski that he was the architect of the ideological structure of Russian radicalism in the 1860s. “Chernyshevski was the founder of the new period, the preceptor of the younger generation.” This is not to imply that he was a bloodless ratiocinator. Though a more balanced individual in many ways, he was a worthy successor to the passionate Belinski as leader of the intelligentsia. But Chernyshevski was both erudite and systematic. More than the other radicals of this period, except for Lavrov, Chernyshevski was a thinker. Not a thinker of the Kantian type, but one who realized the necessity for popularization and practical application of ideas in his backward Russia. To a large degree, the other leading “nihilists,” Pisarev and Dobroliubov, owed their significance to the fact that they popularized Chernyshevski's outlook. It is to them, with their superior stylistic gifts, that we must turn for the warmth and color and atmosphere of the movement; in Pisarev, of course, there are very significant differences from Chernyshevski; but one could certainly not understand Pisarev without a considerable acquaintance with Chernyshevski's thought. Chernyshevski the nihilist, of course, and not Chernyshevski the socialist or revolutionary, or Chernyshevski as economist—for he was all these—will interest us here.

Any Survey of Russian economic history has two serious barriers to surmount. The first is a tendency to assume that this history either began or ended in 1917; the second is a tendency, induced in part by the remoteness of the country and in part by the difficulty of pronouncing Russian geographical names, to assume that the Soviet Union is a homogeneous steppe evenly populated throughout. This article will survey the growth of the Russian railroad network on the assumption that there is a considerable measure of continuity in Russian economic development, and that regional factors are very important in explaining the course of that development.

Problems of ownership and control are somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but it may be helpful to the general reader to have some idea of the history of the ownership of the Russian railroad network. Ownership and construction of railroads in nineteenth-century Russia were handled in various ways.

The Treaties of Tartu, Moscow, and Riga (1920), riders to the Treaty of Versailles in their acceptance of ethnic self-sufficiency, recognized the four major peoples of the East Baltic littoral area as political entities with the unhampered right to live their present and to determine their future. Whatever may have been the hopes and doubts of those who framed the treaty, its short-term results must have exceeded the most liberal expectations. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in twenty-one packed years of independent existence, showed that a national will, if wisely directed, could maintain economic and political stability, be tolerant to national minorities, and enrich culture with new values.

Among the papers and notebooks left unpublished by Count Alexei Tolstoy at his death on September 28, 1875 there was a poem of sixteen lines in the ballad style entitled Garal'd Svengol'm, or, as we should say, Harold Svenholm. It was published two years later in Katkov's Russky Vestnik, and with it there went a brief, unilluminative editorial note:

In 1659 a Roman Catholic priest of Croatian birth, Juraj Križanić, came to the Muscovy of Tsar Alexis under an assumed identity. His secret mission was to lay the groundwork for the unification of the Slavs under the patronage of the Monomakh crown and papal tiara. For reasons Križanić himself never knew, or never chose to tell, he was exiled to Siberia where he spent nearly all the rest of his life. During those fifteen years he wrote some nine works on religion, philosophy, and politics in a Slavic language of his own invention. These manuscripts were read by practically nobody for two centuries.

Probably Križanić would have long remained unknown had his ideas not engaged the special interest of certain Russian scholars who were inspired largely by the tenets of late nineteenth-century pan-Slavism. The plea of this seventeenth-century Croat for Slavic unity under the aegis of the Great Russian people was well suited to the purposes of Russian Slavophilism. Thanks to these scholars who saw in Križanić an early precursor of pan-Slavism, this remarkable Slav's life and works were slowly retrieved, beginning in the 1850s, from the darkness of the past.

A Hundred Years ago the main tendencies of European poetry before 1848 were summed up in a Polish poem published under the title “Before Dawn.” It was written in the Polish language (Przedświt). There is hardly any poem in any language in which the belief in national renaissance and national freedom has found a stronger expression. The poem appeared at a time when the elite of the European Continent was struggling against the rule of Metternich, and when the elite of Polish youth had again been forced, for more than a decade, to wander through Europe and the world in order to preach the gospel of Poland's approaching leadership.

But there is one feature which signally distinguishes this poem from other prophetic or pseudo-prophetic hymns of its own time and, still more, of future times. It is the respect which its author has for the creative power of the spirit. He even identifies this respect with his very delight in life. The sorrows of a man who has lost his country are transmuted into the sorrows of a whole nation. These sorrows, however, lose their sting because their spiritualization, with the help of love, has led the author to experiencing the preciousness of a future order in a real and happy Europe, which is guided by spirit and not by power.

The Improbable adventures of this charming story are so extraordinarily improbable that we are ready to justify the very possibility of the events related by Pushkin, either by the romantic imagination of the poet, or by the particular conditions of Russian life where the miraculous and eccentric always reigned. Outside Russia, outside that boite à surprises, which Russia has never ceased to be in the eyes of the dazzled, astonished, or scandalized European, we cannot, it seems, imagine this event.

There are many, more or less eyewitness reports of the events in Russia during and after the March Revolution of 1917. Professor Dimitri von Mohrenschildt recently published a very useful analysis listing some twenty-five writers who undertook to report these events to American readers. Some were notoriously sympathetic and others were equally hostile, but very few were politically neutral. Most reporters were more interested in selling than in telling.

According to the evidence found in historical records, the first influences of the Byzantine Christian mission had reached the Magyars prior to the conquest of present Hungary while they were still on the shores of the Black Sea. As I have proved in detail in an earlier treatise, we must surmise that, when they took possession of their present land, the Magyar people had brought with them a knowledge of Christianity.

However, the Byzantine mission was not the sole factor in preparing the Magyars for their acceptance of the new faith. This acceptance was influenced also by the earlier Christian traditions of the new land which ultimately became their country. From Roman times (ancient Christian relics of which are being excavated in increasing numbers) to the appearance of the Magyars, Christianity had existed without interruption in Hungarian territory.