Suchergebnisse

Behold the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker; yet he is the creatorBehold the believers of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker; yet he is the creator.Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herd and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeksâ—those who write new values on new tablets.Thus Spake ZarathustraBetween 1898 and 1917 a massive surge of creative activity transformed the Russian cultural scene. Experimentation in all the arts was accompanied by a revival of interest in philosophy and religion. This is the era of Diaghilev and the Russian ballet, of the painters Chagall and Kandinsky, the composers Stravinsky and Skriabin, and scores of lesser-known artists and writers. Poetry, dormant since the 1840s, revived and flourished, and literature explored new themes and techniques.

Sometime between 1533 and 1536, a certain Ivan laganov, writing from prison, addressed a petition to the child ruler Ivan IV in which he suggested that his release would be in the interests of state security. laganov apparently had enjoyed a successful career as a political informer under Ivan's father, and after the death of Vasilii III had continued to serve his new sovereign in the same manner. On his last mission, he explained, he had reported to Ivan's boyars as ordered, informing them of the "dangerous talk" he had overheard: "At that time, Sire, I could not plug my ears with pitch; what I heard, Sire, I reported, in the way in which I served and reported to thy father." As a result, laganov now found himself in fetters, tortured "in the manner of evil traitors and brigands," and deprived of food and drink.

Translated from Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo, no. 11, 1970.

Russian and Eastern European studies have been among the earliest and most important of the postwar develop ments in regional programs, partly because of the evident im portance of these areas, partly because of their relative accessi bility as an extension of European studies. Experience thus far would indicate that these undertakings have been intellectu ally beneficial both to the established academic disciplines and in the creation of programs for other regions of the world. Motivated by the effort to comprehend a society as a whole —an effort of particular importance in the Soviet case—these programs have achieved, in a number of universities, a vigorous multidisciplinary approach to both teaching and research. The very expansion and vitality of Russian studies have, however, created certain problems: chiefly, with the incorporation of new subjects, the danger of overloading the student's curriculum or unduly prolonging his graduate school career. It seems likely that the future will witness the continuation of these programs, but accompanied by increased activity in Russian studies within the various departments and disciplines.