Hugolin Gavlovic's Valaska Skola (The Shepherd's School), written in 1755 in the Slovak language before its codification in the late 1780s, will be of great interest to linguists as well as to specialists in Slovak literature and of the Slavic Baroque in general. Gavlovic (1712-87), a Franciscan priest, combined devotional poetry with an indignant social satire and broad range of...

This collection of articles is devoted to Vasiliy Pavlovich Aksenov, one of the most outstanding writers in contemporary Russian literature. In spite of all changes, turn-abouts and zigzag developments so typical of Soviet cultural life in the past thirty years, Aksônov managed to shape his own creative profile as a writer independent of political pressures; he gained his artistic reputation...

Here is the story of Vasily’s Island, the largest of the islands that make up St. Petersburg. While small in size, it has played a substantial role in several aspects of the city’s life since its founding in 1703, becoming above all its intellectual and educational center. Although little more than a glorified sandbar in the early eighteenth century, Vasily’s...

Chicago native, political activist, and journalist Ernest Poole (1880-1950) provides a distinctive view of the Bolshevik Revolution in his work, The Village: Russian Impressions. This work is unusual in the library of American accounts of Revolutionary Russia because he addresses the world of the Russian peasants, far away from the revolutionary centers of Petrograd and Moscow. He associated with a...