Among Soviet Central Asians who have achieved international attention, Bobodzhon Gafurovich Gafurov, the late director of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, stands out as a leading figure. Gafurov was politically the most prominent Tadzhik, if not Central Asian, in the Soviet Union. During the twenty-one years that he served as the Institute's director, he influenced and made decisions which have led to an overall increase in scholarly research and publication about West Asia, and about Soviet Central Asia in particular, emanating from the Soviet Union.

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titles Liubov’ pchel trudovykh and Zhenshchina na perelome. They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.

Stalin's “last word” on German reunification was contained in the Soviet diplomatic note of March 10, 1952, which proposed a peace treaty with Germany. Until the middle of 1953, Stalin's heirs continued to press for reunification on the basis of the 1952 note. The East German uprising of June 17, 1953 (which is commemorated in West Germany, with unintended irony, as the “Day of German Unity“) marked the de facto termination of the Soviet reunification initiative. As a result of the uprising, the rulers of the Soviet Union and East Germany were forced to place greater emphasis on the consolidation of the Communist regime in the GDR—that is, the stability of East Germany required policies explicitly directed toward the development of a separate, socialist East German state. Thus, the uprising and the subsequent Soviet intervention further undermined the credibility of an already questionable Soviet reunification initiative.

The Arts of Bulgaria since World War II are of considerable interest for the history of art largely because they so directly demonstrate what happens to the arts of a previously non-Communist country under Soviet dominance. Since the Communist take-over, not only has Bulgarian art directly reflected the Soviet political line but it has done this even more thoroughly than the art of the Soviet Union itself. For beautiful Bulgaria is such a compact and homogeneous little country—about 325 miles long and 215 miles wide, with a population of only 8 million people, about 90 percent of whom are of specifically Bulgarian stock—that its Communist government can control the arts with far greater ease than can the regime of so enormous and racially diversified a nation as the Soviet Union. Even long before World War II, Slavic Bulgaria had closer cultural links with Slavic Russia than did any of the other countries that fell under Soviet political domination as a consequence of the war. As might therefore have been expected, its arts have reflected the influence of the Soviet aesthetic of “socialist realism”—and the distinct but related and highly relevant Stalinist formula of an art “national in form and socialist in content”—more directly than have those of the other “satellites.”

The Character of Mickiewicz's poetical world is determined, as that of every writer, by two factors, the epoch which furnished the material for his imagination along with the general literary style prevailing in this epoch, and his poetic personality, which formed and transformed this material. His epoch was that of romanticism, hence his world is basically romantic with a definitely, sometimes exclusively Polish flavor; his poetic (and human) personality was one of the most powerful, hence it expressed itself both in romantic and extraromantic forms in a highly individual manner, uniting national and universal elements.

This world embraced vast and various regions, extended—according to the general romantic spirit and the prologue to Faust—“vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle.” Heaven and hell were represented, both by an absolute faith in the supernatural world and by literary accessories, for instance by employing good and evil spirits, ghosts, witches, mermaids, and so on, as symbols of strong, mysterious forces, not only mingling with the human world, but directly influencing human fate.