For more than 135 years the “Will” of Peter the Great has flitted across the stage of history at moments of tension between Russia and her Western neighbors. Recently it turned up at a business luncheon in New York in a speech delivered before a large audience; it is being discussed by “displaced persons” in their camps throughout Central Europe; and it was circulated among the armed forces of a European nation. Anonymous and parentless as a ghost, it appears, gains credence, and then vanishes again into its forgotten grave.

Here is the text as it appears today:

1. The Russian nation must be constantly on a war footing to keep the soldiers warlike and in good condition. No rest must be allowed, except for the purpose of relieving the state finances, recruiting the Army, or biding the Favorable moment for attack. By this means peace is made subservient to war, and war to peace, in the interest of aggrandizement and increasing prosperity of Russia.

Nicholas I (1825-55) gained the reputation of being the most reactionary tsar the Russian Empire ever had. The eminent historian S. M. Solov'ëv called him “the new Nebuchadnezzar.”

The ugly features of a government which oppressed the people and systematically suppressed all enlightenment and free thought became particularly evident under the autocratic “stick” of this sovereign. The overwhelming majority of the Russian people were still tied to the land, either as State and Imperial Crown peasants, or as private serfs; the latter, especially, living under the most miserable economic conditions, deprived of personal liberty, were degraded almost to the level of chattels.

Against such a background of despotism and serfdom there could develop only a system of justice representing a monstrous abuse of equity; and indeed the courts and their members at the time of Nicholas were in complete harmony with the epoch.

On January 18, 1948, the Gosplan, the supreme planning authority of the USSR, published its annual report on the economic results of the past year. The following comments are presented on that portion of the report which deals with the development of Russian industry during 1947. The report follows the exasperating practice of its predecessors in that the information given refers almost exclusively to percentage changes from unspecified magnitudes, and thus with-holds absolute data on the growth of industrial output. The present report contains, however, an interesting indirect disclosure with respect to the total value of industrial output.

Puškin's interest in folklore has long been noted in scholarly Puškin literature. Like all great writers, Puškin turned to the sources of the people's creative genius, from which he drew a wealth of inexhaustible material for his inspiration. His first poem, “Ruslan and Ljudmila,” based on Russian folk tales, struck a severe blow to Russian classicism and provoked a polemic of major proportions in the Russian literary world. The critics did not spare the young poet but attacked him mercilessly. Puškin, however, never deviated from his chosen path, and throughout his stormy life he carried with him his interest in the people's creative genius, to all the places to which his “unfriendly fate” flung him.

One such place, the scene of Puškin's exile for his freedom-loving ideas, for his “Ode to Freedom,” and for his satire on General Arakčeev, was Bessarabia, which only eight years before had been annexed to Russia and therefore still retained all its national oriental color.

In 1845 Dostoevski] made his debut with Poor Folk, a novel in letters. The two correspondents are a very poor government clerk, Makar Alekseevič Devuškin, and the very much younger, impoverished orphan, Varvara Aleksevna Dobroselova. Devuškin, who is a distant relative of the girl, loves her in a disinterested, fatherly fashion in which, nevertheless, there is a slight trace of shy infatuation. He wants to see his Varinka every day. This is possible since they live in neighboring houses. Devuškin fears, however, that his too frequent visits may compromise Varinka in the eyes of her neighbors. Thus he limits his personal visits to a minimum and uses letters as a substitute. This is the motivation for the letter form and the content of the letters. As they are to be a compensation for personal conversations and chats, the letters are not written in a formal style but rather in an unconstrained, conversational manner.

Discussion of the parallel characteristics of Petõfi and Eminescu is not new in the comparative history of East European literatures, but those who have investigated the problem failed to grasp the common Danubian peculiarities of these two great poets and thinkers. Their analyses were bound to fail, because they compared more or less isolated poetic details and purely literary resemblances or contrasts; in brief, they were limited to aesthetic considerations. Nobody has tried to present the whole personality, the whole human attitude, of the two eminent writers, although the most important aspects of their literary and political activities can be understood only by a thorough knowledge of their intellectual and emotional reactions. The aim of this study is, not only to fill this gap, but also to attract the attention of foreign readers to the parallel phenomena of Middle and East European cultural life.