Although, before the First World War, Slavic affairs received but little attention in the United States, libraries were in this respect somewhat ahead of the times and started building their collections at a relatively early juncture. It is true that in 1901 Herbert Putnam, then Librarian of Congress, found that the Library proper could count only 569 Russian and 97 Polish books among its own holdings. The Russian collection, he commented, “has few of the original authorities, and is weak in modern descriptive works. On the history of Russia and on the Crimean War [there are] only a few of the principal authorities.” Yet pursuant to an act of Congress passed in 1866, the Library held in deposit, though not in ownership, a more substantial if not very appreciable set of publications which had been received by the Smithsonian Institution in exchange for materials supplied to learned institutions in East and East Central Europe.

It is commonly supposed that confessional adherence was the decisive element in the growth of Croat and Serb nationhood: “In the differentiation of Serbs from Croats and the rise of modern Serb and Croat national consciousness, religion played the essential role in the Serbo-Croatian linguistic area. Whereas the Catholics by rule became Croats, the Orthodox were Serbs.” This none too precise formulation assumes that, quite independently of preexisting South Slavic affinities, a homogeneous national “mass” became heterogeneous by reason of outside dispensational intervention. Without fully analyzing whether religion indeed separated the South Slavs into different nationalities or whether religious affiliation simply reflected the allogenic nature of the South Slavic settlement — such an analysis would be difficult to sustain on the basis of current ethnogenesic knowledge—I suggest that the confessional “rule” is hardly as firm as some scholars suppose and needs to be qualified.

The late summer of 1914 demonstrated that for most European Social Democrats nationalism was far more powerful than Marxism in the event of a conflict between these ideologies. Some Social Democratic parties did not participate in this demonstration, however. Not until the late autumn of 1939 did it become apparent to all that Finnish Social Democrats, for example, were nationalists before they were Marxists. The fact that Finland was not a belligerent in World War I left this question open. Until the demands made by the Soviet Union in October-November, 1939, and the beginning of the Winter War (which included the abortive proclamation of a Soviet-sponsored Finnish Democratic Government), bourgeois Finns were uncertain about the response of Social Democrats to any serious Soviet challenge to continued Finnish independence. In view of the tragic Finnish Civil War of 1918, this uncertainty seemed grounded in historical fact. As the largest party in Finland (representing forty percent of the electorate in 1939), the Social Democrats' attitude would prove decisive in determining the strength of Finnish resistance to Soviet diplomatic and military pressure. Like other Finns, Social Democrats fought, sacrificed, and died to defend their nation. The visible symbol of the unity of this nation in the Winter War was the Social Democratic Foreign Minister, Väinö Tanner. It was at this point that Tanner stepped into world politics. A Finnish scholar has concluded that in the Moscow negotiations of 1939 the two Finnish delegates, Tanner and J. K. Paasikivi, “ … held the fate of Finland in their hands.”

The evolution of Aleksandr Pushkin's ideology and poetics in the 1830s has long been the most controversial issue of Pushkin studies, the greatest stumbling block to biographers and literary critics. Grigorii Gukovskii's simple scheme, which construes Pushkin's "path" as a steady progression from romanticism toward realism and historicism, though not yet totally refuted, is gradually falling out of favor, for it ignores, contradicts, or misinterprets obvious "archaic," retrograde trends in Pushkin's late writings. Repudiating and subverting contemporaneous romantic codes, Pushkin, as a number of recent studies have shown, does not replace them with innovative prerealist or realist ones but tries to rejuvenate certain outdated eighteenth-century systems.