The Project Gutenberg eBook of A history of Slavic studies in the United States
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: A history of Slavic studies in the United States
Author: Clarence Augustus Manning
Release date: February 22, 2025 [eBook #75446]
Language: English
Original publication: Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1957
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES ***
MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES
III
A History of Slavic Studies
in the United States
A History of Slavic Studies in the United States
Clarence A. Manning
_Associate Professor of Slavic Languages Columbia University_
THE MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS
MILWAUKEE 1957 WISCONSIN
MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES are published under the direction of the Slavic
Institute of Marquette University.
_Edited by_ ROMAN SMAL-STOCKI
_Advisory Board_ CYRIL E. SMITH
ALFRED SOKOLNICKI
CHRISTOPHER SPALATIN
The views expressed in the MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES are those of their
authors, and are not to be construed as representing the point of view
of the Slavic Institute.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 57–11742
©Copyright, 1957, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
INTRODUCTION vii
_Chapter 1_ THE SLAVS IN AMERICA 1
_Chapter 2_ MASS IMMIGRATION 9
_Chapter 3_ SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 17
_Chapter 4_ THE BEGINNING OF FORMAL STUDY 25
_Chapter 5_ SLAVIC EFFORTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I 36
_Chapter 6_ FROM 1914 TO 1939 44
_Chapter 7_ SLAVIC STUDIES SINCE 1939 62
_Chapter 8_ THE FUTURE TASKS OF SLAVIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES 83
Integration in American consciousness. The divisions of
the area. Undergraduate courses. Language
instruction. Graduate work. Area studies. Summary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 109
INDEX 114
Introduction
Preparing an adequate history of Slavic and East European studies in the
United States is not an easy task. Much of the pertinent material has
never been collected. Where it has been brought together, it has never
been adequately evaluated or put in its proper setting against the
general American cultural and educational development. Any attempt at a
synthesis of the situation must then be highly tentative, subject to
correction and amplification.
In the formal sense, studies and courses in the Slavic languages,
cultures and history began to appear in American colleges and
universities at the end of the nineteenth century, largely through
individual interest and effort. Until World War I, these courses
developed slowly and aroused little interest. We can say the same of the
formation of libraries and of collections of other materials. If then we
should treat the history of Slavic studies in this narrow sense, we
would secure a creditable but small list of courses and publications
multiplying on a large scale only since World War II began.
Yet, this picture would be incomplete. It fails to consider certain
factors which have greatly influenced American life and thinking and
which will in the future exert still more influence. It likewise ignores
significant achievements of earlier periods. It ignores certain
individuals who, though only tenuously connected with universities and
colleges, influenced the course of events. It ignores also that one
phenomenon that sharply differentiates the scope of Slavic and East
European studies in the United States from such studies anywhere else in
the world. That is the presence in the United States of millions of
Slavic immigrants and their descendants. These have played a hitherto
unrecognized part in the country’s development and at the same time have
given it some unusual aspects.
Slavic studies in the United States can never be as important as in
those countries where the dominant language is Slavic, and where a
knowledge of the language is a necessity for daily life. There the
Slavic tradition, even under external pressure, is still alive. It
expresses itself in every form of culture, every study of the local
environment, natural or artificial. Thus, from late in the eighteenth
century, the universities of Austria-Hungary, especially the University
of Vienna, and those in such Slavic centers as Prague, Krakow, Lwow and
Zagreb developed flourishing centers of Slavic studies. The universities
in the Russian Empire also concentrated not only on Russian, but on all
the other tongues. It was in these countries that Slavic languages came
earliest and most completely into their own, as they later did in the
independent Slavic countries.
Yet Slavic and East European studies are not in the same position as
they were in past decades in Germany, France and the British Isles.
There, they were definitely intellectual disciplines which might find
practical use in certain governmental and educational posts but which
were of interest only to a small number of specialists. In those
countries there were learned professors of Slavic. This is especially
true of Germany and France where relatively large groups of outstanding
Slavs, chiefly of the educated, professional and political classes, were
able to influence higher level thought in those countries. Few ordinary
Slavs appeared in either country. Those who did were mostly migratory
workers who did not take root in their new environment, and exercised
little influence.
That is not true in the United States. There were before World War I a
small number of outstanding representatives of the Slavic nations, free
or not. But the United States was also brought face to face with the
immigration of millions of Slavic workmen and peasants. These brought
little material or consciously intellectual baggage to the country but
took root here and, under the leadership which they developed in the
United States, have played a steadily increasing role in American life.
They and their descendants of the second and third generations are not a
negligible force. Their children and grandchildren may have lost a
certain facility in the use of their mother tongues but they have
retained qualities, knowledge and traditions which are vital to the
United States today and which cannot fail to have a far-reaching effect
upon the entire world in the future.
We cannot then speak of Slavic studies merely in the narrow sense of the
word. We must take into account these other factors which are rapidly
becoming tangible elements in all of American life. In this sense we
must consider Slavic and East European studies to include those means
other than political propaganda which have led to the present American
knowledge of the Slavic world, a knowledge with some striking insights
and some equally amazing gaps.
The present survey is an attempt to handle all aspects of the growing
awareness of the Slavs by the American people and the American
educational system. Yet we can hardly do this without a brief survey of
the way in which the Slavs appeared on the American scene and the
methods by which they have come to assume their present position. The
complete history of this has never been written though we do have a fair
outline of the various stages of the movement.
CHAPTER 1
THE SLAVS IN AMERICA
We have no records of the arrival in what is now the United States of
the first Slavic nationals. We don’t know from where they came or where
they settled. But it seems certain that at an early date Slavs appeared
in all of the various streams of colonization though primarily as
individuals. We must remember that it was not until the nineteenth
century that the world became seriously interested in the nationality
and language of a person. The medieval period had thought only in terms
of allegiance to a given monarch or to some supernational state which
embraced persons of many tongues and origins, united in a common
loyalty.
This held true for the first two centuries of American settlement and we
always have to take it into account. It may be well to glance briefly,
then, at the political situation in the Slavic lands, from the discovery
of America through the next century.
Christopher Columbus discovered the New World less than a half century
after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks and the liberation of
Moscow from the Tatar yoke. Europe was filled then as now with homeless
people, the Christians of the Byzantine Empire and of the Balkan
Christian states, preferring the hardships of a wandering life to
existence under the Mohammedan Turks. The armed forces of all countries
were filled with adventurers who had been driven from their homes and
were glad to fight as mercenaries.
For example, there were Greek soldiers in the armies of Francisco de
Pizarro in his conquest of Peru in 1532. Later these same men took sides
with Diego de Almagro in his revolt against Pizarro and made for him the
first cannon cast in the New World.[1] This intermixture of
nationalities continued throughout the era of the discovery and the
ensuing decades. This was the height of the Spanish power and it was
under the flag of Spain that men of all nationalities, especially from
the Mediterranean area, went to serve.
At this time, the most powerful Slavic state was the Polish Republic,
the _Rzeczpospolita Polska_. Yet this was far more than ethnographic
Poland. It took in almost all Ukrainian and Byelorussian lands as well
as ethnographic Lithuania and Latvia and a considerable part of eastern
Germany. It maintained the closest connections with the Danubian
principalities and even Hungary. Thus, a person known as a Pole could
very easily have been one of several Slavic and even non-Slavic
nationalities.
The Czechs formed the nucleus of the Kingdom of Bohemia, itself a
subsidiary of the Hapsburg domains, the Holy Roman Empire (which, to use
the words of Voltaire, was already ceasing to be either Holy, Roman or
an Empire). The Slovaks and the Carpathian Ukrainians were under the
Crown of St. Stephen of Hungary as were the Croats, while the Slovenes
were more particularly connected with Austria. Yet again, the lands of
the Crown of St. Stephen were also part of the Empire.
Thus the only Slavs not included either in the Ottoman and Hapsburg
empires or in Poland were the Muscovite Russians. At this period few of
them thought of crossing the boundaries of their western neighbors.
Those who left their original homes traveled eastward and by the middle
of the seventeenth century had reached the Pacific ocean and were poised
to cross the north Pacific at its narrowest point.
We must keep these facts in mind when we think of the early Slavic
immigration to the United States. This jumble of nationalities and
states was still more confused by the fact that the overwhelming
majority of the educated Slavic population used one of the three
international languages of the day. The Roman Catholics used Latin, the
Orthodox employed either Church Slavic or Greek, and these “higher”
tongues supplemented and in large part replaced the vernaculars in legal
and historical records. This was a period of religious turmoil as well,
beginning with the Hussite wars in Bohemia. These were continued by the
Protestant Reformation touched off by Martin Luther and the
Counter-Reformation under the leadership of the Jesuits. At the same
time, the new Protestantism and the older Latin Rite were spreading
among the Orthodox Slavs and the situation was still further complicated
by the Union of Brest in 1594 which formed the so-called Uniat Church or
Catholic Church of the Eastern Rite.
Each of these religious disputes, with the political consequences that
they involved, added to the number of displaced persons. The adherents
of every religion found shelter with their friends in any of the
countries of Western Europe—England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and
Holland. These were added to the number willing to risk anything to
secure a new home. This was the background of the early colonization
efforts in America.
The Spanish settlements in the southwest are less easily discussed.
There can be no doubt that the leaders of the great religious orders
that spread through California and New Mexico were of Spanish birth but
there is considerable evidence to show that some of their subordinates
were probably of Slavic origin. At least they seemed familiar with the
peculiarities of Orthodox iconography. The Spanish mission in Santa
Barbara, California, displays the Eastern form crucifix. Many of the
wood paintings of saints in New Mexico superficially resemble crude
icons. Yet little has been done to trace the early lives of the monks
who worked in these missions. It would certainly not be surprising to
find that some had made their way to the Spanish centers of the
Franciscans and Dominicans from the disturbed area of Eastern Europe.[2]
We are on far surer ground when we come to the colonies established by
the English along the Atlantic coast. In 1610, the Virginia Company sent
to Jamestown, with Lord de la Warr, a group of Polish gentlemen as
workmen. These were apparently refugees in England from one of the many
upheavals in the _Rzeczpospolita_. Their names appear in Anglicized
forms and since we have no information about their experiences before
they reached England, many of them have been claimed by the Poles,
Ukrainians, and the other peoples included in the Polish state.[3]
The same situation prevailed in New Netherlands. There can be no doubt
that some of the settlers in the new Dutch colony were Slavs. Thus for a
long while, the name of the Zeboroski[4] family, one of the early
settlers, was written in Jersey Dutch. The family is proud of its Polish
origin but again like so many, it also has been claimed by the
Ukrainians. Another Slav of this period is Augustine Herrman, a skilled
surveyor from Prague. He apparently went first to Virginia, then moved
northward to New Amsterdam and later founded Bohemia Manor in Maryland.
Efforts have been made by both the Czechs and the Germans to prove that
he was of their origin but what proof there is favors the Czechs.[5]
Many other families, such as the Roosevelts, can trace their origin to
the Baltic states but leave us to decide from which particular group the
original ancestor came.
A still more tangled situation arose in the early colony of Delaware,
while it was still New Sweden. The Swedes eliminated the first Dutch
settlement around Fort Casimir and then in 1641 founded their own Fort
Christina and sent over a population of Swedes, Germans and Finns, and
all this at a time when the Poles and the Swedes were conducting their
own warfare behind the shelter of the Thirty Years War. At the same time
the Swedes were trying to make the Baltic a Swedish lake and their
representatives were deeply involved in negotiations with the
_Zaporozhian Kozaks_ who were in an almost constant state of revolt
against Poland. The Swedes then ruled both Livonia and Estonia. In view
of all this it would have been surprising indeed if there had not been
Slavs in the colony of New Sweden, the area in which the traditionally
American form of the log cabin seems to have originated, a form
reminiscent of the architecture of the East Baltic Slavs. The evidence
for New England is less clear, though we know that the authorities of
the new Harvard College seriously thought of inviting the distinguished
Czech educator, Jan Amos Comenius (Komensky) to serve as the first
president, in 1630. However, nothing came of it.[6]
In the eighteenth century there is the same uncertainty. In 1741 a group
of the _Unitas Fratrum_ (the Bohemian Brethren) from Bohemia and
Moravia, were led by Count Zinzendorf to a settlement in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. It is at least possible that some of these settlers spoke
Czech as well as German. If they did, it would explain more clearly the
interest in the community that was taken during the American Revolution
by General Kasimierz Pulaski, who seems to have made a point of
attending religious services there whenever he could. The architecture
of the older buildings further suggests Slavic influence.
The American Revolution brought to the New World another group of Slavs,
of whom the best known are the two Polish leaders, Generals Pulaski[7]
and Tadeusz Kosciuszko.[8] Pulaski, already a well-known figure in
Poland, brought with him a number of other East Europeans and Slavs who
formed a considerable portion of the famous Pulaski Legion. We have also
the names of others, such as Count Bienowski and Colonel Michael Kovach,
an Hungarian, a member of the Legion who was killed at Charleston, South
Carolina, in 1779. Most of the Legion’s survivors stayed in the new
country.
Another possible source for inspiring Slavs, and especially Poles, to
come to America was the career of Major General Charles Lee,[9] of the
American Army. He had once been in command of the Cadet School in Warsaw
founded by King Stanislaw Poniatowski. In addition to that, most of the
French troops who served in America had previously been on duty in
western Poland supporting the Saxon claims to the throne and helping the
Poles oppose Russian domination. There is no way of knowing whether or
not this force had received Slavic recruits during its term of duty
there. The services of both Pulaski and Kosciuszko, and the later return
of Kosciuszko to the United States in 1797, built up considerable
interest for Poland in the United States. This continued for nearly a
half century, leading to a fair amount of immigration from the former
Polish state, especially after the Polish Revolt of 1831.
Moreover, American newspapers of the time published long accounts of
events in Europe. Thus, in 1733 John Peter Zenger included in the New
York _Weekly Journal_ an account of the efforts of Stanislaw Leszczynski
to secure the throne of Poland. Numerous similar examples could be
cited. However, no organized interest in Slavic lands and peoples
developed.
Little is heard of Russians at this period, although American
representatives had appeared in St. Petersburg during the Revolution and
the Tsars, in the early 1800’s, began to send diplomatic representatives
to Washington. Prince Dimitry Golitsyn,[10] a member of a socially
prominent Russian family, was the first Roman Catholic priest to be
fully trained and ordained by Bishop Carroll in the United States. He
continued until the end of his life to be one of the leading Catholic
priests in Pennsylvania, and maintained contact with the Russian
Ministers in Washington. We also know that in 1800, Kutusoff mantles and
bonnets were very popular in New York society.[11]
Until 1848, the Slavs who came to the United States came either as
individual travelers or as individual immigrants, perhaps drawn in the
train of some more prominent compatriot. There are several interesting
accounts of this period, in Polish, such as those by Juljusz Ursin
Niemciewicz who came with Kosciuszko in 1797 and remained in the country
for several years. He visited Boston around 1799 and his diary mentions
a Polish Unitarian library, the _Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum_, in
Harvard of which nothing is now known.[12]
The situation was different in the Pacific northwest.[13] The Russians
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reached the Sea of
Okhotsk and Kamchatka in their eastward advance and began to push into
the north Pacific in quest for furs. Late in the century they started to
establish more or less temporary trading posts on the Aleutian Islands.
In 1783, Grigory Shelikov established a more permanent center at Kodiak.
This center of Russian influence was later transferred south to St.
Michael on the site of the present Sitka in 1800. (The ablest Russian
governor, Aleksander Baranov, went further. In 1811 he sent his most
trusted assistant, Ivan Kuskov, to establish a Russian trading post at
Fort Ross, not far from San Francisco). Shelikov had founded the
Russian-American Company to exploit these new lands, and his talented
successor, Nikolay Rezanov, visited the New World in 1805, dreaming of
controlling the entire Pacific coast, including the Spanish settlements
in California with San Francisco as their head. On his return across
Siberia he died at Irkutsk as the result of a fall from his horse and
his dreams largely perished with him, although later the Russians did
try to seize the Hawaiian Islands and make the north Pacific a Russian
lake.
Fortunately for the Americans, the Russian settlements were poorly
supported from St. Petersburg and the intricacies of Russian law left
Baranov and his successor without the necessary supplies and they were
compelled to indulge in illegal trade with the British. Boston merchants
also carried to Kodiak and Sitka the goods which the Russian-American
Company had neglected to send.
Strangely enough, the Russians failed to cross the coastal mountains
either in Alaska or further to the south. They contented themselves with
the hunting of marine animals, especially the sea otter, sending the
skins back to Siberia for Asiatic distribution. They apparently did not
realize that the American continent could be crossed by land, a peculiar
oversight when we remember their rapid crossing of the whole of Asia.
Rezanov had hoped to make Kodiak a center of Russian culture. He had
come to Russian America by sea from St. Petersburg and brought with him
a large library of books for an academy which he proposed to establish.
Apparently Shelikov had spread excessive stories of the Russian
achievements, for Kodiak was only a wretched frontier village and not an
embryonic metropolis, Slava Rossii, as he boasted. Rezanov’s collection
remained in Kodiak until its destruction by fire on July 18, 1943.
The Russian Orthodox Church also sent a mission to the colony. The
monks, largely from Valamo, were devoted men and at least one was a
martyr. The greatest of the Russian clergy was Ivan Venyaminov, later
Archbishop Innokenty, Metropolitan of Moscow and one of the great
figures of the Russian Church. This mission converted the majority of
the Aleuts and Eskimos in the neighborhood and the Russian language was
long the common speech on most of the Aleutian Islands.
Russian expansion thus had begun to take shape seriously at about the
same time the Americans began to push westward. After buying the
Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson sent
an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the
northwest. In 1806 the expedition reached the mouth of the Columbia
River. Then followed the settlement of Astoria by agents of the American
fur trader, John Jacob Astor. By the time the Russians were ready to
advance to the south, the Americans were established in the center of
the area and the Russian colonies never formed a solid belt on the west
coast. For some reason the Russians did not try to eliminate the
Americans and the southern settlements began to wither away from
inability to expand. In 1841, Fort Ross was sold to a group of Americans
and the Russians withdrew northward.
The lively trade between Sitka and Boston was interrupted by the War of
1812 and when peace came, commerce was further hindered by Russian
efforts to impose trade restrictions that were unacceptable to the
Americans. These came at the same time as the revolutions and
declarations of independence of the Spanish colonies and the adherence
of Tsar Alexander I to the Holy Alliance to aid Spain in recovering
them. The Russian efforts at controlling the north Pacific and the
American sympathy for the Spanish colonies led to the proclamation of
the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 which doomed European expansion in the New
World. Both President Monroe and his Secretary of State, John Quincy
Adams, had held diplomatic posts in Russia and were aware of the
differences between the Russian and American points of view.
The Monroe Doctrine and the settlement of the northwest determined the
fate of Russian America. It was blocked to the south by the United
States and the British settlements in the Canadian West. In 1867, Russia
realized the hopelessness of its position and sold the territory now
known as Alaska to the United States. The Russians then established
their bishopric in San Francisco but during the next years the Russian
colony in the far west remained an isolated group and it was only toward
the end of the century that it merged with the general Slavic
immigration.
This, then, is the first phase of Slavic contact with the New World.
Relatively little imprint was left on American life, although we must
not undervalue certain ideas that did pass into the young republic. They
were the result of individual effort rather than organized or mass
movements which came later.
CHAPTER 2
MASS IMMIGRATION
As the middle of the century approached the situation began to change
radically. There came a marked improvement in the accommodations and
regularity of the trans-Atlantic ships and contacts between North
America and Europe began to multiply.
Then came the Spring of the Nations, the year 1848, with the efforts of
the Germans and the peoples of Austria-Hungary to put an end to the
prevailing absolutism. This movement failed but it led a large number of
Germans who had supported the Frankfort General Assembly to leave their
native land and to seek refuge in the United States. Most of them
drifted west, settling in many of the Central States and the Middle
West. They took up free land and settled down to become prosperous
farmers. The rumors of their success in adapting themselves to their new
environment spread beyond Germany and fired the resolution of other
discontented peoples.
The first to respond on any large scale were the Czechs. They began to
come in thousands, also tending toward the Middle West and settling on
the new frontiers which had been pushed westward by the coming of the
Germans. They soon began to form extensive colonies in the still
sparsely settled areas of Nebraska, Iowa, and other states until the
coming of the American Civil War, which briefly checked the movement. In
their new homes, and in small communities, they formed a large segment
of the population. They endeavored to transplant their old traditions
and mode of life to America and to establish their own institutions,
making changes only as American law and environment dictated.[14]
The Poles were the next Slavic people to follow. The earliest immigrants
were, as we might expect, from Austrian Poland but after the failure of
the uprising of 1863, refugees from Russian Poland and the area under
German control began to flow in. The earliest immigrants, like the first
Czechs, moved west but after the Civil War the great American industrial
expansion began and the majority of later immigrants were attracted by
the possibilities for work in the mines and factories which were being
built, especially in Pennsylvania. The movement for immigration was
sponsored not only by the employers, who desired a constant supply of
unskilled and cheap labor, but also by the steamship companies which
sent their agents through the European villages and painted in glowing
terms the possibilities of advancement and of wealth in the United
States.
Their blandishments did not fall upon empty ears in the more backward
and underprivileged areas. In a steadily increasing stream, there began
to come to the United States, Slovaks, Ukrainians from Galicia and the
Carpathian area, Croats, and, to a lesser degree, Serbs. There was even
a small settlement of Lusatian Serbs in Texas. This process continued
until the beginning of World War I.
The immigrant ranks included a certain number of educated people but
these were to a large degree interested in some form of art, attracted
by the opportunities for practicing their talents in the United States.
The political immigrants were relatively few for since they had hopes of
affecting conditions in their homelands they preferred to find temporary
refuge in some European country.
The majority of immigrants came from those strata which had become
accustomed to leaving their homes as migratory and seasonal workers.
Most were scarcely literate and were little aware of the cultural
progress that was going on in their homelands. At first they came merely
in the hope of saving up enough money to return and live with more
comfort in their native villages. But it was not long before they either
despaired of this or were attracted to the American mode of living and
sent for their wives and families. Many of these early arrivals had
little national consciousness and the Slovaks and Ukrainians in
particular reflected the conditions prevailing in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century.
The change from the hard but traditional life of the Slavic village to
the confusion and grimness of the American mining or factory town was a
disagreeable shock to many of these immigrants, for it was primarily the
agricultural population of Eastern Europe that poured into the American
factories and mines. The newcomers were exploited everywhere and with
their ignorance of English were at a disadvantage in competing with
their neighbors.
However, they rapidly adapted themselves to their changed environment.
They began to form various kinds of associations for their own advantage
and leaders of their own groups began to appear. Some of these were
unscrupulous men who learned some English and didn’t blush to drain
money from their less fortunate comrades. But the number of those who
seriously worked for the good of the immigration steadily grew and
finally eliminated, to a large extent, the more greedy and grasping
pseudo-leaders.[15]
The Slavic communities in the United States owe much to the priests who
came to serve in the churches which they established in all the Slavic
centers. Some of them had come with the authorization of their superiors
in the Old World. Others simply followed the outflow from their villages
and arrived in America with little more knowledge of conditions than
their flocks. Their lack of familiarity with the legal conditions
governing church property in the United States involved them in many
difficulties. Even the immigrant Roman Catholic priests serving the
Poles and Slovaks could not, at first, easily fit themselves into the
framework of their Church in the United States and through
misunderstandings they often got into controversies with the Roman
Catholic hierarchy here, consisting mainly of Irish and Germans, and all
too often they were tempted to declare their complete independence and
make needless issues over extra-ritual customs and parish organization.
The situation was even worse for the Catholic priests of the Eastern
Rite (the Uniats) who ministered to the Ukrainians from Galicia and the
Carpathians. These people insisted at first upon a married clergy and
since they often came without proper credentials, they were looked at
askance by the hierarchy who had no experience or personal knowledge of
this Rite. In addition, many of the priests from the Carpathians had
been under strong Hungarian influence at home and found it difficult to
serve their flocks adequately in the New World. The Russian Orthodox
were somewhat better off, especially after the seat of the Archbishopric
was moved to New York. But, there again, many parishes indulged in
almost continuous appeals to the civil authority against the
administration of the church. However, by the end of World War I, most
misunderstandings had been eliminated on all sides and the way was open
for smooth and steady development.
Yet it was the priests who became the first community leaders to guide
the immigrants to a new and better life in which they retained as much
as possible of their old traditions.
They and the more experienced lay leaders played a great role in the
organization of the Slavs into fraternal societies, which had risen in
the United States even before the Revolution and since then had grown
steadily and found a place both in American life and American law. On
the payment of small sums they provided protection to their members,
payments in case of death or inability to work and, in some cases other
assistance.
The value of this system was early recognized by the Slavic leaders. At
first the societies were small and purely local but in time the
individual groups tended to unite into central organizations which
acquired larger and larger capital resources. These societies, whether
directly connected with churches or not, gradually came to form a
distinctive feature of Slavic-American life. Today there is no Slavic
group which does not have one or more such organization of national
significance. Among the leaders are the Czechoslovak National Alliance,
the Polish National Alliance, the Ukrainian National Association, the
Serb National Federation, the Polish Roman Catholic Union, the Ukrainian
Workingmen’s Association, the Ukrainian Providence Association, the
Croatian National Alliance. They possess large reserve funds and are
leaders in financial, social, political and cultural work.
Furthermore, as we shall see, it is out of these large, freely
organized, fraternal organizations, with or without church support, that
certain forms of Slavic scholarship have developed in the United States.
This was inconsiderable in the beginning but it has grown and improved
steadily and is destined to play a very important role in the future,
especially in the case of those countries from which there has been an
extensive immigration.
Russian immigration has followed a quite different course. During the
nineteenth century, the Russian Empire tried to channel all movement
from home areas to Siberia instead of across the ocean. For this
purpose, the government appropriated large sums of money and furnished
transportation first from the Black Sea ports to the Pacific coast and
then later along the Trans-Siberian railroad. As a result, prior to
1908, almost the entire Russian immigration into the United States was
from the non-Russian areas in the northwest. This includes the Finns,
the Lithuanians, the Poles and the Jews who began to leave Russia in
large numbers in the nineties because of the anti-Semitic outbreaks.
The actual Russian population of Russian Alaska had been small. But,
during the second half of the nineteenth century, after its sale, a
number of Russians drifted across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco.
The seat of the Archbishopric of the Aleutian Islands and North America
was moved from Sitka to San Francisco. In 1900, there were enough
Russians on the Atlantic coast to warrant Tikhon, later Patriarch of
Moscow, moving his episcopal seat to New York.[16] This was done not
only to serve the needs of the Russian Orthodox population but to enable
him to exert an influence on the Greeks and other Orthodox who had
emigrated to the east coast. About 1905, the difficulties between the
Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Catholics of the Eastern Rite made
opportune a Russian attempt to bring the Eastern Rite adherents back to
Orthodoxy. At the outbreak of World War I the bulk of the Russian
Orthodox Church in America consisted of converts from Galicia and the
Carpathians. There also had been Russian immigration after the
revolutionary disturbances of 1905, but in 1904 the actual Russian
immigration in America was small, far less in numbers than any other
Slavic group except the Bulgarians.
By 1914, the Slavic communities in the United States especially the
Czechs, the Slovaks and the Poles, were already well organized. These,
with their national committees, played a considerable role in securing
the independence of their homeland. They supported directly and through
their American non-Slavic friends the work of Thomas G. Masaryk and
Ignace Paderewski. Similarly, Professor Michael I. Pupin stood out as
the leader of the Serbs and indeed of all the Yugoslavs. The Ukrainians
were less fortunate, for at the moment they had no leader well known to
the American public and they encountered the opposition of both Russian
and Polish groups, whose nations had dominated Ukraine for centuries.
After World War I, the interrupted stream of immigration again broke
through and during the early years it assumed even larger proportions
than it had previously. In addition, many White Russians who had fled
from the Bolsheviks came to the United States.
The cultural level of the Slavic communities rose rapidly, assisted by
better educational opportunities for them both at home and in the
immigration. A large number of highly educated Russians had come over
and the opening of Washington legations for Poland, Czechoslovakia and
Yugoslavia gave the immigrants pride in their own origin and intensified
their contact with cultural work being done in their liberated
homelands. The same effect was achieved by the Ukrainian diplomatic
mission to Washington under Dr. Bachinsky and later Dr. Luke Myshuha,
although unfortunately this did not receive final recognition by the
United States.
In 1924, this influx of immigrants was brought to a halt by the passing
of American immigration laws which introduced the principle of national
quotas and regulated the number of immigrants admitted each year by a
ratio based upon previous arrivals. This penalized the Slavs severely
for their immigration had been relatively recent and their quotas were
reduced almost to the vanishing point. Contrariwise, the peoples of
Northern Europe, who had arrived earlier, were assigned quotas which
they never filled.
So, from then until World War II, the American Slavic communities
remained relatively static in numbers, growing only by natural
increases. However, this was also a period when earlier efforts began to
bear fruit and Slavic cultural and financial importance increased
rapidly. The second generation, educated in American schools, was
beginning to produce a new type of leadership. It took its place in the
general American cultural, economic and political life with consequent
results upon both the country as a whole and upon the Slavs. There was
increased cooperation between the Slavs and the rest of the American
population, a period of growth and development from within.
After World War II, the displaced persons from Europe began to enter the
United States in large numbers. From 1939 on, there came a surprisingly
large number of highly educated persons, largely Poles, who were fleeing
from both the Nazis and the Communists. These new arrivals revivified
the intellectual and cultural interests of the older immigrants and
their descendants and, furthermore, they brought the best traditions of
education and scholarship from their homelands.
We can thus divide the growth of Slavic influence into four periods.
I. _From the beginning to 1848._ During this period, the immigrants
arrived as individuals and with few exceptions were absorbed rapidly and
almost completely into the main streams of American life.
II. _From 1848 to 1924._ This was the period of the mass immigration,
largely of unskilled laborers who came to secure the material benefits
of life in the United States. Yet it was also the period when the
general outlines of Slavic life in America were being sketched,
organizational and church affiliations were made, and the immigrant
groups were taking root as large units in the United States.
III. _From 1924 to 1939._ Despite the almost complete lack of
immigration, Slavic communities were beginning to attract the attention
of the American public. Internally they were completing their adaptation
to the American mode of life with far greater success than had seemed
possible a few decades before.
IV. _Since World War II._ Most of the leaders who refused to accept
Communism have come to the United States. The outstanding scholars and
artists have also come to find refuge. In some instances, it is no
exaggeration to say that centers of the higher culture have been
transferred to the United States. Simultaneously, the emergence of this
country as the spokesman and champion of the free world has awakened far
broader classes of the American public to the importance of the Slavs in
the modern world and has led to a greater demand for scholarship in
those fields which concern the Slavic nations.
There are thus two separate streams of Slavic scholarship in the United
States. The one is the normal inclusion of Slavic subjects, history,
culture and languages into the American universities and colleges. This
has been a normal process of development, just as in other areas of
study. Side by side with this, however, have been the efforts of the
national Slavic groups in the United States. These two streams developed
for many years in almost complete separation, but between the two World
Wars they began to affect each other. Since World War II, the two
streams are slowly but surely merging and it is probable that in the
future they will be completely consolidated to the advantage of Slavic
scholarship, the American people, and the entire free world which still
maintains those universal ideals that have come to dominate
civilization.
CHAPTER 3
SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Slavic studies were slow in making a formal appearance in American
colleges and universities. There were many reasons for this, not the
least being the general submergence of the Slavic countries (except
Russia) in the eighteenth century. At this period, the Slavic languages
were little studied in Germany or France, far less in England and thus
their absence in the United States is readily understandable.
In addition, the early American colleges, especially before the Civil
War, had limited curricula. They were modelled on Oxford and Cambridge
but, restricted in finances, libraries, and personnel, their curricula
were largely adapted to the presumed needs of the day. They were
intended to prepare men for the Protestant ministry or the law.
Enrollments were small and confined to certain groups of the population.
There was relatively little broad intellectual interest in the country
although men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or even Count
Benjamin T. Rumford had won recognized places in the world of
scholarship and of ideas.
The modern languages, chiefly French, were taught more or less by the
same methods as the accepted classical languages and Hebrew. It was only
in the first quarter of the nineteenth century that George Ticknor
introduced at Harvard detailed work on modern European literatures. This
was followed in the twenties and the thirties by the introduction of
some Spanish and Italian, largely influenced by the revolt of the
Spanish colonies in South and Central America.
We should not then be surprised that the earliest interest in the Slavic
languages was shown by individuals who, by some means or another, had
had contact with the Slavic world and whose concern was more or less
amateurish. Some of these men were college graduates. Others had had no
formal connection with the colleges of the day but had learned to know
and appreciate Slavic culture and had set themselves the task of making
and publishing translations in America. These began to appear shortly
after the War of 1812. The Napoleonic Wars and later the war with
England had interfered with American trade and commerce but had also
stimulated American interest in Europe. This interest was also aroused
by the Greek war for independence and the formation of a group of
Hellenophiles in New England. Even before this, in 1810, the
Congregationalists of Boston had established the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions. It sent missionaries to the Near
East and these, originally working to convert the Mohammedans, soon
transferred their activity to Orthodox Christians and to the foundation
of such American missionary educational institutions as Roberts College
and the American University in Beirut, later to play so prominent a part
in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
The visit of the Marquis de Lafayette in 1825 also recalled the American
Revolution and the services of the various foreign officers who had
served in the American Army, including Generals Pulaski and Kosciuszko.
Interest in Poland was again stirred by the Polish Uprising of 1831.[17]
Thus the growing American prosperity and the strengthening of the
American national consciousness started a ferment which for a number of
years caused a growing interest in some forms of Slavic culture in the
United States, especially in New England. We must remember that this was
before any mass Slavic immigration to the United States, although there
were a considerable number of Slavs in the country, especially in the
north and in the ocean shipping sections.
The first translator of Russian poetry in the Anglo-Saxon world was, in
all probability, William David Lewis.[18] His career is typical of this
period. Lewis was born in 1792 in Christiana, New Castle County,
Delaware. He received some education in Clarmont Seminary and Lower
Dublin Academy and was then apprenticed to a merchant. However, his
brother, John D. Lewis, who was established in St. Petersburg as a
merchant asked his younger brother to join him in 1813. This was during
the War of 1812 and the young man, in order to get to Europe, secured a
post as private secretary to the peace commissioners. He sailed for
Europe in 1814. Leaving his post at Gothenburg, he went on to St.
Petersburg where he spent most of his time until 1824.
Lewis had excellent connections in St. Petersburg. He met and became
friendly with Count Nesselrode, with the Cossack leader, Platov, and
also with Nikita Ivanovich Grech, the editor of the _Syn Otechestva_. He
also seems to have met the elderly dean of Russian poetry, Gavriil
Romanovich Derzhavin. It was perhaps under the influence of Derzhavin
and Grech that he began to translate Russian poetry. On January 31,
1821, apparently while on a visit home, he published in the _National
Gazette and Literary Register_ of Philadelphia a poem, _Stanzas_, by
Yuri Aleksandrovich Neledinsky-Meletsky.
Lewis was becoming especially interested in the pre-Pushkin period of
Russian poetry. However, in 1849 he also published in Philadelphia,
where he made his home, a volume of translations entitled the
_Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems_, a name taken from one of
Pushkin’s early poems. Grech saw to it that Lewis’ book was
appropriately reviewed and praised in the conservative Russian literary
journals. However, Lewis was not primarily a man of letters and his
contribution ends here. Even before he left St. Petersburg he had
embarked upon a series of disputes with some of the American diplomatic
representatives in the Russian capital and the next decades he spent as
a successful business man and politician. For a time, 1849 to 1853, he
was Collector of Customs in Philadelphia. He died in 1881. Lewis was
slightly ahead of the work of Sir John Bowring who published in 1821–23,
two volumes of _Specimens of the Russian Poets_. He followed these later
with translations from Polish and Serb poetry, inspired by interest in
the Serb folksongs. The translations were widely read in the United
States.
The translations of Bowring, and a special interest in the works of
Mickiewicz, determined the career of James Gates Percival.[19] He was
born near Hartford, Connecticut, in 1795 and was graduated from Yale in
1815. A student of languages, a poet of stature, an excellent geologist,
Percival was eccentric and somewhat of a recluse. His works attracted
little more than local interest and were soon forgotten. He finally
became the state geologist of Connecticut and later of Wisconsin, where
he died in 1856. For more than twenty years, though, he had done Polish
translations and contributed articles on Polish literature and history
to various periodicals. Some of these were little more than a rewriting
of articles published in European journals, for Percival knew ten
languages and was abreast of European developments. His knowledge of
Polish was not too thorough, but at the period he influenced a group
known as the “Connecticut Wits” and is a good example of the American
interests of the time.
A more substantial contributor was the better known Talvj,[20] the
author of the _Historical View of the Languages and Literatures of the
Slavonic Nations_. This was the first survey of the Slavic literatures
after the works of Safarik. Talvj had a remarkable career. Her real name
was Therese Albertine Louise von Jakob. She was born in Halle, Germany
in 1797, where her father, Ludwig Heinrich von Jakob, was a professor at
the University of Halle. In 1807 he was invited to give a series of
lectures at the University of Kharkov. Therese soon became a competent
linguist, began to translate the novels of Sir Walter Scott into German,
and in 1825 published in German a collection of the _Volkslieder der
Serben_, again in response to an interest in the Serb folksongs.
In 1828 she married Edward Robinson, an American Congregational minister
and scholar who was then a professor in the Union Theological Seminary
in New York. Robinson was much interested in Biblical archaeology,
edited a popular religious journal, the _Biblical Repository_, and spent
considerable time in the Biblical lands. He published his wife’s work on
Slavic literature in this journal. In 1850 it was issued in book form.
When Robinson died in 1863, Talvj (her pen name was taken from the first
letters of her name) returned to Germany. She died in 1870 in Hamburg.
Talvj’s book was probably the outstanding work on the Slavs done by a
non-Slav in the first half of the century. Unfortunately it attracted
little attention even though it was much sounder than were many of the
studies written as much as a half century later. It received due
recognition only after Slavic studies in the Anglo-Saxon world had begun
to find themselves and had shown a certain independence of thought.
The approach of the American Civil War and American preoccupation with
western expansion turned interest away from Slavic themes. It was only
near the end of the Civil War that we begin to find truly interested
spokesmen for Slavic culture and even then the leaders were men who had
personal connections with the Slavic World, often through service in the
American diplomatic corps.
One of these was Jeremiah Curtin.[21] Born near Milwaukee, Wisconsin in
1840, after a common school education and some study at Carroll College,
Waukesha, Wisconsin, he went to Harvard where he received his degree in
1863. A few months later, he met Admiral Lisovsky and the other Russian
naval officers in the fleet that visited New York. They induced him to
go to Russia and for a while, he was secretary of the American Legation
there. On his return to the United States, he did some work on the
folklore of the American Indian but later returned to Russia and
traveled extensively in the Caucasus. He wrote a great deal about his
experiences but achieved most of his fame by his translations of the
novels of the Polish writer, Henryk Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz’s _Quo
Vadis_, in Curtin’s translation, has kept its place as the most popular
piece of Slavic literature in English. It has been produced several
times in the movies and while Curtin’s name is largely forgotten, his
translations are still read and Sienkiewicz is still the best known
figure in Polish literature among Americans.
Another American born in the same year, 1840, was Eugene Schuyler.[22] A
member of the celebrated Schuyler family, he was born in Ithaca and
educated at Yale, where he graduated in 1859. He then went to the
Columbia Law School and on leaving it in 1863, entered the American
diplomatic service. He was American Consul in Moscow and Revel (Tallinn)
and Secretary of the American Legations in St. Petersburg and
Constantinople. While he held the latter post he made a full report on
the Turkish atrocities against the Bulgarians in 1876. For a while he
acted as Minister Resident in Greece, Romania and Serbia. He was
regarded as somewhat too pro-Russian, though, and in 1889 the Senate
refused to confirm him as Assistant Secretary of State. Schuyler died in
1890. His chief work was a two volume biography of Peter the Great which
appeared in 1884 and was the chief American historical work dealing with
a Russian subject. While it has been outmoded by later historical
research, the biography still stands as a monument to his scholarship
and understanding of the Russian scene.
George Kennan was slightly younger.[23] He was born in 1845 in Norwalk,
Ohio. He received little formal education but became an expert
telegrapher and was used on important assignments by the Western Union
Telegraph Company, including service in the telegraph office of the
White House during the Civil War. As the Civil War drew to its close,
the American and Russian governments became interested in a plan for
linking San Francisco and St. Petersburg by telegraph. Parties of
trained men were sent to various points in the northwest and to Siberia
to make the preliminary surveys and to build the line. Kennan was placed
in charge of the section that was working in the northern part of
Siberia. He spent some years in the wilderness there and became familiar
with the life of the native population as well as the Russians. When
construction was stopped after the completion of the Atlantic cable,
Kennan traveled extensively in the Caucasus and spent some time in St.
Petersburg. He recounted his experiences in a volume, _Tent Life in
Siberia_, published in 1870. His familiarity with the natives of Siberia
and the wilder tribes of the Caucasus led him to feel that Russia, with
its multi-national population, was in a way similar to the United States
of his day with its still unintegrated masses of immigrants and its
still hostile Indian population.
After working as a reporter and war correspondent, he was sent in 1885,
by the Century Company to visit and report on the Siberian prison camps.
He was able to do this because of the many friends in high position that
he had made during his previous visit. He was profoundly shocked by the
conditions and his attitude, previously friendly to the imperial regime,
turned into utter disgust. He secured priceless material from the
Russian revolutionists whom he met on his travels and when he published
it in the Century Magazine and later in book form, in 1891 (_Siberia and
the Exile System_), it speedily became one of the outstanding
denunciations of the imperial regime. It had much to do with opening the
eyes of the Western World to the cruelty and barbarity of the imperial
administration of justice. George Kennan continued his work as a
reporter and war correspondent in both the Spanish-American and
Russo-Japanese Wars. He died in 1924.
The last of this group of nineteenth century amateurs was Isabel
Florence Hapgood.[24] She was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1850
and passed most of her early life in Worcester. She early became
interested in translating and after working in the chief European
languages, began to teach herself Russian. She started work on
translating Tolstoy and also published a book on the byliny, _Epic Songs
of Russia_. In 1887 she made her first visit to Russia and met many
important officials and writers. For the next twenty years, she
dominated the Russian translation field in the United States with many
translations from Tolstoy, Turgenev and other authors. In 1906 she
brought out her greatest piece of work, a translation and adaptation of
the Service Books of the Russian Orthodox Church, for which she received
a gold watch from Tsar Nicholas II. The work was reprinted several times
then, and again after World War I by the Young Men’s Christian
Association in Paris. For years she was a well known figure at the
services of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in New York. She rarely
missed a service and she carefully explained the ritual and its
significance to the Americans who attended. Miss Hapgood paid another
visit to Russia during the winter of 1916–1917 and on that occasion she
was received by the Tsarina. She was in St. Petersburg when the Russian
Revolution broke out. Her friends succeeded in getting her out of the
capital and in enabling her to return to the United States through
Vladivostok. Before her death in 1928, she saw her work replaced in
large part by newer translations and she keenly felt the destruction of
the old regime with which she had been connected for almost half a
century. Yet her importance as one of the first serious translators from
Russian into English must not be forgotten. She still remains an
interesting figure in American-Russian relations.
This brief review of the leading figures makes it clear that they worked
outside the educational system of the United States. They were persons
who had developed, for one reason or another, a personal interest in
Slavic affairs. Many of them had lived in one capacity or another,
largely as members of the American diplomatic service, in some Slavic
country. They were strict individualists and did not try to develop
students or assistants. They worked as they pleased and on what they
pleased and if their work was later recognized, they often paid no
attention to it except for the pride any person feels in recognition and
honor.
During this entire period, the colleges and universities had taken no
part in the development. The educational system ignored both the Slavic
culture and the steadily increasing number of Slavic immigrants. They
continued the usual curricula and developed their courses and work in
the traditional languages of Western Europe.
Yet the results which these individuals had achieved cannot be
overestimated. By the end of the century the leading works of Russian
literature, especially the novel, were generally known to American
readers, though all too often from English versions of French and German
translations. The appreciation of Polish culture had decreased during
the century as the memory of Pulaski and Kosciuszko faded, not without
the active cooperation of the representatives of Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Russia, which had succeeded in removing Poland from
the European map and in presenting Polish artists and writers as members
of their own states. The culture of the other Slavic peoples was even
less known and studied.
Yet when we say this, we must never forget that the situation was little
better in England. Even in France and Germany, Slavic studies had not
really found themselves. It is true that professors like Jagic, August
Leskien, E. Berneker and A. Brueckner had already started on their
brilliant careers. Morfill and later Nevill Forbes in England were
trying to hold up a standard. Even there, though, a study of the Slavic
languages and culture, as well as the presentation of the great Russian
novelists, was done in an highly out of context manner. So it also was
in the United States where interest had been concentrated in the hands
of a few select individuals who had worked on their own and for their
own pleasure.
CHAPTER 4
THE BEGINNING OF FORMAL STUDY
The second half and particularly the last quarter of the nineteenth
century was a period of rapid development in the American educational
system. Even before the Civil War, ambitious young men, dissatisfied
with the rigid curricula of the American colleges, had begun to go to
Europe, chiefly to Germany, to study and secure the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy. To a large extent the German universities came to take the
place of even Oxford and Cambridge, the chief goals of the few pre-Civil
War students who had gone to Europe.
In the same way, foreign scholars began to come to America. Again these
were largely German or at least German-trained. Some of these men
received, through some chance contact, direct invitations. Others,
forced by the shifts of German politics and the Revolution of 1848, left
their homes and joined the mass emigration to America that was already
beginning. In either case, their influence was to the good.
In 1867, Johns Hopkins University was established as a definite
post-graduate school, granting the doctorate. It was the first such
establishment in the United States and President Gilman secured a
distinguished faculty including such foreign scholars as Paul Haupt in
Semitic Languages and Maurice Bloomfield in Indo-Iranian. Other
outstanding men were soon appointed and the ideals of German scholarship
were solidly established. Undergraduate work at Hopkins was regarded as
merely an incidental in the first years of the institution’s life.
The example of Johns Hopkins was not directly followed but it exerted a
marked influence upon some of the more important of the older
institutions. Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Princeton and a few others began
to offer more advanced instruction and step by step the modern American
graduate school, with its special course of study, was evolved. This
process required some decades and each institution approached the
problem in its own way, integrating the new work in accordance with its
own traditions. As these developing universities broadened their
interests and the range of their activities, it was only natural that
sooner or later they would come to take into consideration the study of
the Slavic peoples and their culture, especially of Russia.[25]
The first step was taken at Harvard under the influence of Archibald
Cary Coolidge.[26] In a very real sense, Coolidge was typical of the men
whom we have considered in the preceding chapter. He was born in
Massachusetts in 1866 and graduated from Harvard in 1887. He then went
to the University of Freiburg for his doctorate, receiving it in 1892.
During these five years, however, he took time out from his actual
attendance at courses to serve as Acting Secretary of the United States
Legation in St. Petersburg in 1890–1891 and to act, in 1892, as private
secretary to his uncle, then United States Minister to France.
He returned to the United States in 1893 and took a position in the
Department of History at Harvard. The next year he introduced a course
on the history of northeastern Europe. This was, in other words, a
course in Russian and Polish history. It was the first time anyone had
offered a course covering Russia which did not view her history solely
in terms of contacts with the West, the Eastern Question, the fate of
the Ottoman Empire and the relations of Russia with the countries of
Western Europe.
Professor Coolidge was an enthusiast and was deeply convinced of an
American need to study the Slavic World. He expounded these views in a
paper delivered before the American Historical Association in 1895. By
the next year he had added a course at Harvard on the Eastern Question.
At about the same time he secured the appointment of Leo Wiener as
Professor of Russian Literature. This marked the actual beginning of
Slavic studies in an American university.
Professor Coolidge never gave up his interest in the work. In addition
to the courses that he gave, he superintended the building of the Slavic
collection in the Harvard Library and served constantly as an adviser to
the United States government on Slavic matters. He brought out, in 1915,
a volume on the _Origin of the Triple Alliance_ and during World War I
was one of the committee of scholars formed under the leadership of
Colonel House to prepare materials for the American Delegation at the
Peace Conference. In 1918 he served as a special representative of the
American government in Sweden and north Russia, and in 1921 he was sent
by the American Red Cross to negotiate with the Bolshevik government on
famine relief. In 1922 he founded _Foreign Affairs_, the organ of the
American Council on Foreign Relations and the leading journal in this
field. He personally acted as editor until 1927 when he relinquished the
task to Hamilton Fish Armstrong who had been in the American service in
Serbia during World War I. When Professor Coolidge died in 1928, he was
the undisputed dean of American Slavic historians and the inspiration
for a large part of the work that was then being done in the United
States. His influence on the development of studies in history was
greater than that of Leo Wiener on languages and literature.
Leo Wiener (1862–1939) published in 1902 and 1903 an _Anthology of
Russian Literature_. This incorporated almost all the translations
previously made, including excerpts from the greater Russian writers.
The first volume, which included Russian literature up to Karamzin,
still remains the best collection in English of the older literature.
Where translations were unavailable, Professor Wiener made his own in
prose. He also published in 1904 and 1905 a translation of the chief
works of Tolstoy. Unfortunately in his later years, he lost interest in
Russian and devoted his energies to studies of Ulfilas and the Gothic
texts and many other questions far removed from his original field.
A great many of the scholars who became prominent in Slavic history
before and during World War I were students of Professor Coolidge, who
thus became the dominant force in the development of historical studies
for many years. Among these was Frank A. Golder (1877–1929) who
developed Russian history at Stanford University. He stressed, as we
might expect, the American contact with Russia in the north Pacific and
the Russian explorations in that area. In 1914 he published _Russian
Expansion in the Pacific (1641–1850)_ and later edited the accounts of
Bering’s voyages.
Another of Coolidge’s students was Robert J. Kerner (1887–1956), born in
Chicago. Kerner took his A.B. at the University of Chicago and then
after study in Europe received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1913. He was at
first connected with the University of Missouri, but in 1928 went to the
University of California at Berkeley, where he spent the rest of his
life. He was made Sather Professor of European History in 1941. When he
retired, in 1954, he was also Director of the Slavic Institute of the
University of California. Professor Kerner, who was of Czech origin, did
most of his work in Czech history, especially the period following the
Battle of the White Mountain. In 1932, he published _Bohemia in the
Eighteenth Century: a Study in Political, Social and Economic History,
with Special Reference to the Reign of Leopold II (1790–1792)_. He
published other works on the Western Slavs and the Balkans. He was
recognized by the scientific societies of both Czechoslovakia and
Romania before World War II and was decorated Commander of the White
Lion of Czechoslovakia, and Officer of the Crown of Romania. Belgium
also honored him for his work at the Peace Conference of 1919 as well as
for later services.
Another pupil of Professor Coolidge, Robert Howard Lord (1885–1954) took
his degree in Harvard in 1910 and remained there on the faculty. In
1915, he published _The Second Division of Poland_. During and shortly
after World War I he was very active in Polish studies and served on the
House Commission of Scholars to prepare materials for the Peace
Conference in 1919. However, he suddenly gave up this field of
scholarship, resigned his post, completely withdrew from previous
scholarly contacts and began to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood.
Perhaps the most important of all of the Harvard students of this period
was George Rapall Noyes (1873–1952). A native of Massachusetts, he
studied with Professor Wiener. From 1898 to 1900, he held a Harvard
University Fellowship for study at St. Petersburg. Upon his return, he
spent a year as Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Wisconsin and then went to the University of California as Assistant
Professor of English and Russian. In the first year of his work at
California he had only five students in Russian and one in Czech, but as
the numbers grew he gradually dropped his work in English and by World
War I he was able to devote himself entirely to Slavic studies.
During the War, he secured Alexander Kaun as his assistant. Kaun was
born in Russia in 1889 and studied from 1905 to 1907 in the Free
University of St. Petersburg. He then came to the United States and from
1909 to 1916 taught Hebrew in Chicago. He went to California and in 1917
became Assistant in Russian. He took his M.A. and Ph.D. there and
remained on the faculty, rising to the rank of Professor in 1943. Kaun
was decidedly leftist in his sympathies and was a typical member of the
Russian intelligentsia in its narrowest sense. He was one of that group
far more interested in theoretical than practical reforms. This brought
him very close to those members of the intelligentsia who were most
inclined to sympathize with Communism; it determined his views on Maxim
Gorky and Andreyev, the subject of two of his works. He also contributed
many articles on Soviet literature. Professor Kaun died in 1944.
In 1920, George Z. Patrick was added to the University of California
staff. Born in Nizhny in 1883, Patrick traced his name and ancestry to
an Irishman who went to Russia after the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Educated in the _Faculté de Droit_ in Paris and the Moscow Law School,
from which he was graduated in 1912, he came to America with one of the
Russian commissions sent by the Provisional government. After its fall,
he went to California and in 1920 was appointed Lecturer in French and
Russian. In 1923 he dropped his French work and devoted himself entirely
to Russian. In 1940 he was appointed to a full professorship. However,
his health was poor and after years of suffering and long periods of
inability to work, he died of tuberculosis in 1944. Patrick was
undoubtedly the best teacher of Russian that the American universities
have had. He was a charming and sincere man and was the best beloved
professor in the field.
The addition of Kaun and Patrick to the staff at the University of
California allowed Noyes to give up most of his Russian work and devote
himself primarily to Polish. He visited Poland in 1921 and was welcomed
at the University of Krakow where he stayed for some months. The Polish
government decorated him as Commander of _Polonia Restituta_ and several
Polish scholarly societies elected him to membership.
Even in his early days at California, Noyes commenced his work of
translation. Among the earliest was a collaboration, the _Heroic Poems
of Servia_, with Leonard Bacon of the English department. Later Noyes,
with the aid of numerous assistants, translated most of the important
works of Mickiewicz, Slowacki and Krasinski, and also many Russian
dramas including a volume, _Masterpieces of Russian Drama_, ranging from
Fonvizin to Mayakovsky. It was his practice to write out a very careful
prose translation and then have some of his students and associates set
them, when necessary, into verse. Noyes really founded a special school
of translation.
He was an earnest and sincere student, mild but demanding, especially of
himself. He carefully laid out his projected work for years in advance
and maintained a rigid schedule. Any pressure of university duties or
unforeseen calls upon his time he met by including in his work schedule
all those periods which he had left himself for vacations. When he died
in 1952, he was the last of the old generation. He left a gap in Slavic
scholarship that has not yet been filled.
The interest in Russian on the Pacific coast was reflected not only in
the appointment of Golder to Stanford’s history department. In 1918,
Henry Lanz was appointed Professor of Russian Literature and Philosophy
there. Lanz had been born in Moscow in 1886. He was not a very prolific
writer but one of his works on rhythm of language received a prize from
Sweden. Just before the outbreak of World War II, he made another trip
to Europe and stayed for some time in one of the monasteries on Mount
Athos. He died in 1945.
Another outstanding figure of the period was Samuel N. Harper
(1882–1943) of the University of Chicago. Harper was the son of the
first president of the University of Chicago. He studied in the _Ecole
des Langues Orientales_ in Paris and was closely associated with the
group of English Slavists who, under the leadership of Sir Bernard
Pares, K.B.E., gathered at the University of Liverpool and after the war
formed the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London.
Harper was in Russia with Pares during the Revolution of 1905 and was
very friendly with such liberal Russian leaders as Paul Milyukov. In
1906 he published an English translation of Boyer and Speranski’s
Russian Reader and in 1908 a volume on the _New Electoral Law for the
Duma_. Through his connections at the university and Charles R. Crane,
both Milyukov and Maxim Kovalevsky were brought to Chicago for lectures.
Harper was a constant adviser to the United States government on Russian
affairs. He was convinced that the Russian people, if they had the
power, would definitely accept the Anglo-Saxon theories of democracy, a
position which he maintained in his dealing with the Russian emigres
after the Revolution. He was solidly anti-Bolshevik but in the thirties
he accepted an invitation to visit Moscow, about the same time as Pares
did.
Harper had a wide knowledge of Russian history, and when he was not
traveling, lectured in Chicago and conducted courses in Russian. Yet he
did not build a department of Russian and, despite the large Slavic
population of the city, showed little interest in introducing other
Slavic languages or cultures.
Another important center, started just as World War I was beginning, was
at Columbia University. Although Dr. Judah A. Joffe had been appointed a
lecturer in Russian for one year, in 1909, to prepare some articles and
lectures on Russian literature for a volume on European literatures
which the university was publishing, the serious work was begun only
when John Dyneley Prince, then Professor of Semitic Languages and an
authority on Assyrian and Sumerian, offered courses in Russian and
Slavonic philology. Prince was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1868 and
was an 1888 graduate of Columbia. He took his doctorate at Johns Hopkins
in Semitic and conducted excavations in Mesopotamia. He was later Dean
of the graduate school of New York University and then was brought to
Columbia.
In addition to his academic work, Prince was greatly interested in
conservative New Jersey Republican politics. He served as both Speaker
of the House and President of the New Jersey Senate when Woodrow Wilson
was Governor. In 1921, President Harding appointed him United States
Minister to Denmark and President Coolidge in 1926 transferred him to
Yugoslavia. He was absent from the university therefore from 1921 to
1933, when as an ardent Republican he retired from the diplomatic
service after the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Prince was an unusually talented linguist who fluently spoke nearly all
European languages, including Hungarian and Turkish. He was also a
master of several Algonquin Indian dialects and a masterly singer of
folksongs. He had previously turned this unusual ability to good use in
his political campaigns among the New Jersey voters of various foreign
nationalities. When he turned to Slavic, he easily mastered nearly all
the languages and soon was able to speak them readily. In addition, he
was an excellent philologist and it was in this field that he most
enjoyed himself. He published a _Russian Grammar_ in 1919 under great
difficulties because of the general lack of proper type. Later he
published grammars of both Latvian and Serbo-Croatian. He was also a
great friend of Professor Michael I. Pupin, the distinguished Serb
professor of electricity.
All these abilities made him determined not to allow the department, at
Columbia, to be limited only to Russian. He offered courses in 1914 on a
graduate level with Ivan S. Andreyevsky as assistant. At the same time,
through University Extension, he started credit courses in Polish with
Dr. Albert Morawski-Nawench as instructor. Dr. Morawski-Nawench was a
Polish journalist and editor who had received his doctorate at the
University of Vienna. Czech was offered by Alois Koukol, a Presbyterian
minister, born in Kutna Hora and educated in Prague.
In addition to these courses, Prince opened in Columbia University
Extension a special school of spoken languages. These were non-credit
courses and Prince hoped to develop them, in time, into something like
the _Ecole des Langues Orientales_. Courses were offered in some twenty
languages. This undertaking was nipped in its infancy by Prince’s
appointment to Denmark, for after his departure the original program was
abandoned. It had considerable effect for some years, however, both upon
the Department of Slavonic Languages and several others.
In 1917, Prince invited Clarence A. Manning to be Lecturer in Slavonic
languages. Manning had received his doctorate in Greek and Latin at
Columbia in 1915 and had become interested in Russian while on a Cutting
Fellowship, traveling in Europe at the outbreak of World War I. He was
on leave of absence from the university in 1918–1919 while serving in
the Corps of Intelligence Police and the Translation section (M.I. 6) of
the United States Army War College. During Prince’s absence, he served
as acting executive officer of the department.
On his return to Columbia, in 1933 Prince resumed his professorship but
because of failing health and eyesight he retired in 1937. He died in
1945. In this early period, two doctorates were conferred. One was
conferred on Mr. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, Director of the Slavic department
of the New York Public Library, for a study of Dostoyevsky’s ideology;
the other on Milivoy S. Stanoyevich, for a work on early Yugoslav
literature.
In addition to these main centers, there were several other developments
worthy of mention. Professor William Lyon Phelps, the distinguished
professor of English at Yale University, published in 1911 a popular
work, _Essays on the Russian Novelists_. He was assisted in preparing
this by Max S. Mandell who for a decade continued to give courses in the
Russian language. Mandell also published a translation of the plays of
Turgenev and several other works.
Professor Clarence L. Meader of the Department of Classics at the
University of Michigan also introduced courses in Russian and published
a translation of the plays of Andreyev. Professor Harold H. Bender of
Princeton, starting from a study of linguistics, came to stress the
influence of the Baltic and Slavic languages, especially Lithuanian. In
neither case was there a department definitely established at this time.
There were also a great many professors in various other fields who did
valuable work on Slavic subjects. It would be impossible to list all of
these works though some should be mentioned.
Professor Vladimir Simkhovich was appointed a professor of Economic
History at Columbia in 1904. There he continued work which he had
started at the University of Jena in 1899 on _Die Feldgemeinschaft in
Russland_ and, in 1908, _Die Bauernbefreiung in Russland_. Several
dissertations on Slavic subjects were accepted by the faculty of
political science at Columbia, such as the _Eastern Question_ by
Professor Stephan Duggan in 1902 and the _Making of the Balkan States_
by W. S. Murray in 1910.
Professor Ales Hrdlicka, the distinguished Czech anthropologist and
authority on the population of the Aleutian Islands, published several
works on the Czechs and on the _Races of Russia_ for the Smithsonian
Miscellaneous Collection for 1919.
Professor E. A. Ross, a sociologist of the University of Wisconsin, was
in Russia during the Revolution and published _Russia in Upheaval_ in
1918, _Russian Bolshevik Revolution_ in 1921, and _Russian Soviet
Republics_ in 1924.
Paul R. Radosavljevich, Professor of Experimental Psychology at New York
University, published in 1919 the two volume work, _Who are the Slavs?_
This was a serious attempt to study Slavic psychology and to identify,
if possible, features common to all Slavic nations.
A psychology professor, Will S. Monroe of the New Jersey State Normal
School in Montclair, traveled extensively in both Czechoslovakia and
Bulgaria and published _Bohemians and Czechs_ in 1910 and _Bulgaria and
its People_ in 1914.
Other men who were active, some of them students of Professor Coolidge,
were: Professor Arthur I. Andrews, Tufts College; Professor A. J.
Shipman, Princeton; Professor Sidney Bradshaw Fay, Smith College, and
Professor Bernadotte Schmitt, University of Chicago. Most of these knew
Russian or one of the Slavic languages but at this period there was no
generally accepted rule that the students of Slavic themes had to be
familiar with the original sources and many of the dissertations and
books published were by men who used materials available in French,
German, or rarely, Latin.
There were also many scholarly books by persons who had little or no
university connections. Included in these are the translations of
_Russian Poetry_ by Babette Deutsch, the wife of Dr. Yarmolinsky, and
the volumes by Julius F. Hecker.
America’s entrance into World War I revealed the American people’s need
for more accurate knowledge of Slavic affairs. This was especially shown
by the confusion which prevailed, even in official circles, concerning
the Russian Revolution and the rise of Bolshevism.[27] It became still
more apparent when the committee, brought together through the efforts
of Col. Edward M. House, to consider the effect of the peace found
themselves hampered by lack of material on the non-Russian peoples of
the Russian Empire. The German materials on these people were suspect,
and the Russian a sealed book to all except a very few of the committee
members, and there was almost no one to deal with materials in the
native languages, especially when the material was not Slavic.
Before the War, German had been the chief foreign language taught in the
American schools and universities. However, hostilities brought general
anger against the Germans and also against certain German professors who
placed themselves all too readily at the service of the German
government. This resulted in widespread opposition to the use of German
and, in fact, to any foreign language. Some states, such as Nebraska,
where there was a large population of German origin, went so far as to
forbid the teaching of any foreign language within the limits of the
state, a ban which was later overruled by the United States Supreme
Court. Even where this extreme was not reached, the number of students
of German declined almost to nothing and many members of the university
faculties either were dropped from their posts or were faced with that
possibility.
In this crisis, and in the hope that the Russian Revolution would
promote democratic contacts and trade with the United States, some of
these former German professors announced courses in Russian. There was
often something humorous and grotesque about this, for there were few if
any textbooks and the professors themselves had little knowledge of the
language. The situation in some cases was scandalous. There is little
reason to do more than mention the existence of this situation. Even
well-known scholars lent themselves to it, only to report a few years
later that there was no call for Russian. As a result, the sudden flurry
of Russian courses was without result and in the years after the War,
they were more or less quietly abandoned. It accentuated the common
notion that Russian could not be learned, an idea energetically fostered
for various reasons. No one took the trouble to realize that the
necessary preliminaries, such as the publication of grammars, were yet
to be done. There were no books available, save a few published in
England, and no real teachers, save some chance immigrants who owed
their opportunities more to good fortune than to ability or training.
Yet the war period did serve to strengthen those departments which had
been previously established. It brought a few new individuals into the
picture and above all it aroused a sense of need that was slowly to be
satisfied.
CHAPTER 5
SLAVIC EFFORTS BEFORE WORLD WAR I
In the preceding chapters, dealing with the gradual development of an
intellectual interest in Slavic questions, we have largely ignored the
activity of Slavic groups in the United States. This was deliberate, for
the early stages of Slavic study were almost completely apart from the
work of the Slavs themselves and involved only those persons who had
come to the United States and achieved prominence or success outside of
their own communities and background.
These early Slavic efforts could make little imprint upon the American
public, for the first steps were taken under most adverse conditions.
The Slavic masses were composed for the most part of the underprivileged
groups who had come to America in the hope of working for a few years
and then returning. Later they became American citizens, but until 1914
a surprising percentage of the Slavs had not taken out citizenship
papers.
For their self-protection and mutual advantage these masses had formed
their own churches and fraternal organizations. There were in the
nineteenth century many difficulties to be encountered by each and the
communities lived apart with relatively little social or political
contact with the rest of the population.
As entire families began to settle, their children were compelled to
attend the American public schools where instruction was given only in
English. It was not long before the preservation of their native
languages became a burning question, to be acted on by the establishment
of language schools held outside of regular school hours, in the late
afternoons, evenings and on Saturdays. For example, the first Czech
school was founded in 1862 by the _Slovanska Lipa_ Society of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. In 1864, the first Czech schools were established in Chicago
and, in 1866, in New York. The example of the Czechs was followed later
by the Poles, the Slovaks, the Croatians, the Serbs and the Ukrainians.
These schools were conducted by the best educated men or women in the
community, though this did not of necessity mean much. Classes were
usually held in the building of a church or other organization, but
sometimes in private homes or in public school buildings, the use of
which was given free by the American school authorities. The textbooks
were inadequate, often being those which the teacher had studied years
before in the home country. Sometimes they were heavily laden with
political propaganda, as were the books prepared for the Carpathian
population by the Hungarian government which exercised a considerable
influence through the Greek Catholic priests who were Magyaron in
tendency as a result of their early upbringing. The situation was made
worse by the fact that the schools in the homelands were themselves
unsatisfactory, either in the hands of the alien rulers or the products
of the vague stirrings of the population to secure their own more or
less illegal schools.[28]
Despite all this, these schools did achieve some success but not enough
to be regarded as a satisfactory solution of the problem. Life in
America, even with its lack of legal barriers or restraints, was
unfavorable to active continuation of a foreign tongue. The contrast
between these impromptu courses and the developing American school
system was too striking to escape the attention of the pupils in the two
types of schools as well as the more intelligent leaders of the
community. In addition to this, these schools failed to give the
students an adequate picture of the progress that their relatives at
home were making.
The Roman Catholic schools were gradually remodelled on the normal
parochial school system. The teachers were, for the most part, nuns and
brothers from orders working among a particular national group. Their
quality of teaching was often quite low but the Church schools did enjoy
the possibility of incorporating the innovations which were coming into
the parochial schools. Thus as the parochial schools were improved, so
were the foreign schools under Church auspices.
In the Orthodox and Catholic Uniat Churches, such instruction was
usually given by the dyak or cantor, a layman who superintended the
choirs and took a part in the services. These men had some education but
little training in teaching and their efforts were largely directed
along the same lines as in their homelands.
The Protestant and anti-clerical groups endeavored to find competent
laymen. These stressed the holding of classes in some lay building or on
the property of some secular organization.
As early as 1881, a journal in Johnson County, Iowa, the _Slovan
Americky_, started a campaign to raise money for a Czech college in
America. The newspaper believed that it could accomplish its purpose if
it succeeded in raising $20,000. The proposal, being launched by a
single newspaper, did not secure the support of rival papers and the
entire enterprise was dropped as a failure.[29]
Out of this chaotic and thoroughly unsatisfactory situation two
tendencies became evident just before World War I. Those Catholic
schools which had acquired some stability and organization began to take
the shape of the other parochial schools and where there was sufficient
demand and a sufficient concentration of worshippers, they began to
approximate the parochial high schools and then to pass over to be two
or three year colleges. The work of these was still not of high calibre
but the leaders were constantly striving to make them so. Thus, the
Czech Benedictines founded a school in Chicago in 1887. This passed
through the usual changes and after its removal to Lisle, Illinois, in
1901 it was reorganized as St. Procopius College, now a duly accredited
Catholic institution. St. Vincent College, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, with a
marked emphasis on Slovak, is another of these institutions.
We find the same activity among the Poles. St. Mary’s Seminary, Orchard
Lake, Michigan, early included Polish in its curriculum, as did St.
Francis Seminary, Milwaukee. Various religious orders have long
conducted courses in the Polish language on the high school level in
various centers of population. The Polish Roman Catholic Union, with its
library, was highly developed by Mieczyslaw Haiman, especially in
publishing studies of the career of such Polish soldiers in the United
States as Tadeusz Kosciuszko and the other Poles who fought in the
American Revolution. The Polish Historical Society also has done
outstanding work. All these represent the natural development of the
Poles and their descendants in America, and deserve more than passing
mention.
At the turn of the century, the fraternal organizations also began to
give the question of schools due consideration. Almost all appointed
committees on education and they too decided that the primary need was
the foundation of special colleges where instruction could be given in
the language of the homeland. Thus, in 1902 there was formed in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa, an institution, _Matice Vyssoho Vzdelani_, a center of
higher studies, by Bohumil Simek and G. F. Severa to work for the
establishment of a Czech college, but it also met with no success.
In 1903, the Polish National Alliance also created a committee on
education and schools, which worked for ten years and then in 1912, at
Cambridge Springs, Pennsylvania, opened the Polish National Alliance
College which was incorporated in 1914. Although it was rather on the
level of a high school, it profited by the opportunity to establish a
branch of the Student Army Training Corps during World War I. Its first
rector was Professor Romuald Piatkowski. In 1915, the work of the high
school or academy was augmented by the foundation of a Technical
Institute. It was in this status that the institution passed into the
next general period.[30]
Other forces were at work, however, to preserve the native languages by
introducing the Slavic languages into the already established American
institutions. While the motives were varied the efforts were made first
by the less clerical and the more Protestant parts of the population.
Thus, in 1887, the Congregational Church in Ohio persuaded the
authorities of Oberlin College at Oberlin, Ohio[31] to introduce a
course in Czech for candidates to the Congregational ministry who would
minister to the Czech communities. Professor Louis F. Miskovsky was
appointed instructor, and his became the first chair of Slavic studies
in an American institution. Oberlin’s program differed from the later
attempts at Harvard and elsewhere in that it was frankly intended only
to teach the language. Any Slavic cultural work in a broader sense was
insignificant. It is small wonder then that on Professor Miskovsky’s
death in the 1920’s, the chair was quickly abandoned and the money used
for a course of lectures on Central European affairs given by Professor
Oskar Jaszy, a liberal Hungarian who opposed both Communism and the
regime of Admiral Horthy.
In somewhat the same way, and for the same purpose, instruction in the
Polish language was introduced into Notre Dame University in 1909.
Efforts to include a Slavic language, usually Czech, in the curricula of
state and private colleges were particularly intense in Nebraska and
Iowa.[32] In these states, the Czech population had been among the
earliest settlers; many had prospered and secured appointive and
elective posts in the state governments, which gave them the opportunity
to work for the introduction of their native language into various
institutions.
In 1903, Professor Bohumil Simek of the University of Iowa and F. J.
Pipal, a student of the University of Nebraska, established at Lincoln
the first of the Komensky Educational Clubs. These clubs were intended
to unite the Czech-Americans who had some education. The movement, which
included plans for building a monument to the Czech educator Jan Amos
Komensky (Comenius), spread extensively and finally included twenty-nine
societies, chiefly in the states of Nebraska and Iowa, although there
were some in Texas, Chicago and New York. For a while this loosely knit
organization was even able to publish a periodical bulletin.[33]
These clubs petitioned at once for the establishment of Czech language
courses at the University of Nebraska. Although the request was turned
down on the ground that there was a lack of interest in such a project
among the Czechs, a new attempt was made during the winter of 1906–07.
John Rosicky, an outstanding publisher of Czech newspapers in Nebraska,
and Vaclav Bures, both of Omaha, met the Regents of the state university
along with Frank Rejcha, a member of the Nebraska legislature. The
Chancellor of the university, in refusing the request, proposed a
political deal whereby a tax of one mill would be laid on certain
railroad properties and earmarked for the university. By clever
lobbying, the Czechs secured passage for the bill. Then the Governor of
the state cut the grants to the university and the Chancellor again
declined to set up a Slavonic department. Later the same summer,
however, another request was more successful and courses were started in
the fall of 1907.
The first instructor was Jeffrey Dolezal Hrbek, a graduate of Lafayette
College, Easton, Pennsylvania, and, at the time, a student in the
University of Iowa. He was appointed head of the new Department of
Slavonic and instructor in the Germanic languages and literatures.
Unfortunately Hrbek, a young man of great promise, became ill and died
on December 4, 1907.
He was succeeded by his sister Sarka B. Hrbkova, who graduated from the
University of Iowa in 1909 and received an M.A. from Nebraska in 1914.
Under her period of teaching, the department flourished. In 1910 she was
named adjunct professor; in 1914, an assistant professor; and in 1918,
she became a full professor. She was also very active during the war in
various aspects of Czech-American relations.
During World War I, the outburst against the use of German spread in
Nebraska to all foreign languages. The courses in the university were
dropped and the department was abolished, while Professor Hrbkova moved
to New York and became the manager of the Czechoslovak Section of the
Foreign Language Information Service, ancestor of the Common Council for
American Unity. The outburst was even worse against Czech courses in the
lower schools and in 1919 the so-called Siman Bill provided that “no
person, individually or as a teacher, shall, in any private,
denominational, parochial or public school, teach any subject to any
person in any language other than the English language.” This was made
more stringent in 1921 but in 1923, the measures were declared
unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.
In the meantime, the break in the university courses was less prolonged.
In 1919–20, during the meeting of the State Constitutional Convention,
two members of Czech origin raised the question of a renewal of the
courses. After negotiations, the teaching of Czech was renewed in the
autumn of 1920 under Professor Orin Stepanek. Stepanek, a native of
Nebraska, received his A.B. from the University of Nebraska in 1913 and
an A.M. from Harvard in 1914. After service in the U.S. Marine Corps he
returned to Harvard and then went to serve under General Snejdarek on
the Magyar frontier. After this, he returned to Nebraska and there
became Assistant Professor of English. While there, he was also giving
courses in Czech and Russian under the auspices of the Department of
Modern Language and, later, of Romance Languages.
We have stressed the history of the establishment of Slavic work at the
University of Nebraska because the Czechs were sufficiently numerous and
influential to be able to reach the university authorities and the state
legislature. More than that, they were persistent and finally succeeded
in securing recognition. Yet in its way, the same type of politics, in
addition to formal applications, was going on with various degrees of
success in many different places.
At about the same time, Czech was included in the University of Iowa
where Miss Anna Heyberger conducted the work. Still later she changed to
Coe College at Cedar Rapids where she became Professor of French and
took a doctorate, with a dissertation on the Czech educator Jan Amos
Comenius, at the University of Paris. Alois Barta was then giving
instructions at Dubuque College and Seminary. For a while before World
War I, B. Prokosch gave courses in Czech at the University of Wisconsin
and Leon Zelenka Lerando at Ohio State University but more lasting
results were obtained by Mr. Charles Knizek at the University of Texas,
where Czech has continued almost without a break since its
introduction.[34] At this time, still other developments, largely
connected with the various churches, were ensuing. For example, Reverend
Andrew Slabey was appointed to the International Baptist Seminary in
Montclair, New Jersey, an institution greatly concerned with training
clergymen for missionary work among various non-English groups and
extensively staffed for such foreign languages as Slovak, Ukrainian and
Hungarian. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Archbishop of the
Aleutian Islands and North America established a small Russian seminary
at Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was later moved to Tenafly, New Jersey,
and its head was Reverend Leonid Turkevich, the present Archbishop
Leonty of the Russian Orthodox Church in North America.
We could extend this list even further, but the institutions at this
period cared for little more than the giving of elementary instruction
in a Slavic language, usually either Czech or Polish. The period
witnessed the publication of a considerable number of elementary
grammars, dictionaries and readers. Many of these were not of high
quality but they did reflect the growing maturity of the various Slavic
communities and their efforts to secure the introduction of their
languages into the curricula of American institutions. Furthermore, at
this period, it was rare that any person in one of these smaller state
institutions could secure a post exclusively in Slavic studies. The best
and most scholarly were compelled to carry almost a full load in some
other subject. But the mere fact that this was possible accents the
increasing number of young Slavs who were securing college and
university educations. The situation was still not healthy but at the
beginning of World War I it was by no means as hopeless as it had seemed
earlier.
CHAPTER 6
FROM 1914 TO 1939
As we have seen, Slavic studies were in their infancy when World War I
broke out. The American reaction to the War was, as we might have
expected, a plain paradox.
American public opinion concentrated on the Western Front and the
campaign in France and only slowly did it begin to react to the enormous
forces that were working in the central and eastern parts of Europe. As
in most countries of Europe, the only persons who took a deep interest
in these areas were the immigrants and the few persons who had already
been awakened to the great problems which the Slavic world of the time
presented.
The clash of Great Britain, France and Russia against Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Italy, the Triple Entente versus the Triple
Alliance, seemed real only in its relations to the Western Front. The
Eastern Front and the titanic passions released in the Slavic lands
under both Russia and Austria-Hungary seemed fantastic to public opinion
and even to the opinion of the educated and intelligent classes. At the
same time, it did have a message for the Slavic communities in the
United States which sought every opportunity to raise their voice in
hope of national liberation. The average American was more moved by the
Armenian massacres than he was by the astounding Russian advances and
retreats in the East. The causes which led the United States into the
War were almost wholly connected with the respective influences of Great
Britain, France and Germany and it was the armistice with Germany on
November 11, 1918 that convinced the American people that the War was
over and that the whole of Europe would very soon return to normalcy.
Consistent with American preoccupation with the developments in Germany,
the agitation for the disintegration of Austria-Hungary vigorously
sponsored by the Slavic colonies in the United States and the various
national committees in Europe found a hearing chiefly as a means of
curtailing German influence. Furthermore, as a result of propaganda
diligently spread during the War, the Russian Revolution seemed to the
majority of the American people another step in the development of
democracy and the break up of the control of Russia by a Germanized
royal family and a Germanized bureaucracy. It might even be said that
the initial distrust of Lenin came because the German General Staff
allowed him to cross to Russia from Switzerland. The disintegration of
the Russian front was laid entirely to German propaganda and the most
ridiculous stories were advanced in order to justify this point of view.
This attitude prompted the American reaction to the efforts of
liberation of the various peoples of the old Russian empire and nearly
all the nationalist movements were laid to German influences.
We may see this in the phrasing of the sixth of Wilson’s Fourteen Points
touching Russia:
The evacuation of all Russian territory, and such a settlement of
all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest
cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her
an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent
determination of her own political development and national policy,
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations
under institutions of her own choosing and more than a welcome,
assistance of every kind that she may need and may herself desire.
On the other hand the non-Russian peoples of the old empire paid no
attention to these remarks by President Wilson. They saw rather the
general principles enunciated in the Fifth Point, “A free, open-minded
and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims based upon a
strict observance of the principle that in determining all such
questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must
have equal weight with the equitable claims of the Government whose
title is to be determined.” In fact he went further and on July 4, 1918
he declared in the “Four Ends” speech: “The settlement of every
question, whether of territory or sovereignty, of economic arrangement,
or of political relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of
that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the
basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or
people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its
exterior influence or mastery.”
Thus the doctrine of self-determination definitely pronounced by
President Wilson was carried still further by the people of the old
Russian empire than he had himself intended. He only provided for
independence for Finland, Poland and Armenia, three peoples who had won
the special sympathy of the American people. In the case of all others,
he was prepared to rest upon his Sixth Point and neglect careful and
accurate study of the conditions prevailing in Eastern Europe.
If space permitted, we could trace this idea in the American attitude to
the Peace of Brest Litovsk, the actions of the American Expeditionary
Forces in Archangel and Vladivostok, the attitude toward the Russian
White armies, the refusal to grant an Eastern border to Poland under the
Treaties of Versailles and Saint Germain, the refusal to recognize the
cession of Bessarabia by Russia to Romania and many other questions. It
insured high favor from those entirely removed from Austria-Hungary and
Germany and relative disfavor from all peoples trying to separate
themselves from Russia.
It is true that from the very beginning of the conflict the leading
intelligence officers like Colonels Ralph Van Deman and Marlborough
Churchill, the real moving spirits of the military intelligence branch
of the General Staff, recognized the importance of the Slavic languages,
and Colonel Graham D. Fitch included the Slavic languages among those
handled in the Translation Section of which he was the chief. Yet on the
whole, the Corps of Interpreters and other concerned branches and units
paid little attention to them and nearly all the American agents in the
Slavic territories were persons who had already known the languages.
Even in the case of the Siberian and Archangel expeditions, the problem
of interpreters was not placed on a firm basis. For some years after the
War, almost all the officers and men in the State Department were
persons who had served in these forces and had attained a certain amount
of Russian or some other language without any formal training.
The situation was the same in the committee formed by Colonel Edward
House to study the peace settlement. It is true that most of the
professors of Slavic were connected with this but it was very soon
discovered that much of the available material could not be used unless
it was in one of the Western languages or, in some cases, in Russian
(and, of course, with a Russian bias).
Thus the World War, and American participation in it, did not result in
any marked increase in interest and there was for some years a strong
feeling that a knowledge of the languages was secondary. The old
divisions between language and the historical sciences were still
perpetuated, gradually breaking down between the wars.
It is true that after the War, the War Department made a half-hearted
attempt to train certain regular officers in various subjects with a
possible eye for making them instructors in West Point. These included
two men who had been on the Siberian Expedition. Lt. Col. Benjamin B.
McCroskey and Captain William Gent were sent to study in the Department
of Slavonic Languages at Columbia University. With the growth of
isolationism the experiment was not pressed, and step by step all of the
government services lost interest except for a few young men in the
State Department who were often sent in some indefinite capacity to the
Baltic republics with the intent of learning Russian.
Thus, at the end of the War, there had come no important change in the
general picture. The departments of language in Harvard, California and
Columbia continued, perhaps with increased staffs, and Professor Harper
in Chicago went on with his work also. On the other hand, there were a
number of universities and colleges, chiefly in the Middle West, where
one or more Slavic languages were taught, often under the pressure of
local Slavic groups. These included Nebraska where Orin Stepanek was
teaching. Czech was also added to the curriculum of Creighton University
in Omaha and the University of Texas in Austin. There were energetic
stirrings among the Poles to introduce their language at the University
of Wisconsin. There were men in various other institutions such as
Professor Leon Zelenka Lerando in Lafayette College who, in at least
part of their work, handled one or another language. Yet in the course
of the years many of those institutions which had included Russian
during the War abandoned it.[35]
A rather unique case occurred at Dartmouth College. Professor R. W.
Jones, who was in the German department, knew some Russian. But, one of
the professors of the English department was Eric P. Kelly, who had been
in Poland with the YMCA during the War and had become vitally interested
in the country and its culture. In 1928 he published a very successful
boy’s story on medieval Poland, _The Trumpeter of Krakow_, which won the
Newberry Prize for Juvenile Books. Later he wrote two more on Polish
themes, _The Blacksmith of Wilno_ and _The Golden Star of Halich_.
Through their influence, William J. Rose, a Canadian and later the
Director of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the
University of London, was brought to Dartmouth for a few years. At one
time it looked as if Dartmouth would establish a full department with
Kelly attracting large classes to courses in Polish in translation.
Kelly became important in Polish intellectual work but for some reason,
despite his popularity, reverted to work in journalism, although he
continued his interest in things Polish outside the institution.[36]
All this was at a time when the bulk of the work on East European
history was still being carried on in the small institutions by men who
had no language training. In far too many places we still can find
traces of this habit.
Another important event of the period, following the Bolshevik
Revolution, was the arrival in the United States of a number of Russian
emigres, on all intellectual levels. Some of them like Professors M.
Rostovtseff and A. A. Vasilieff, were among the most distinguished
Russian scholars. They easily found outstanding positions for themselves
in the leading universities and were able to exert a considerable
influence. They brought with them, in various capacities, men like
Professor George Vernadsky who were to become the heads of their
subjects during the next decades. It would take too long to list all of
these men but among them was Professor Leonid Strakhovsky, Rostovtseff’s
nephew, who taught history at Georgetown University and later moved to
the University of Maryland, then to Harvard and is now at the University
of Toronto. Professor Serge Eliseeff of Harvard was also in the field of
Far Eastern languages. For a while, Nicholas Martinovitch, formerly of
the University of Petersburg, was at Columbia in the field of Turkic
studies. Many more of the younger group have gradually secured good
positions and worked themselves up in the American university system,
sometimes with a change of their names.
The same period saw the arrival in the United States of such outstanding
Ukrainian scholars as the architect and engineer, Professor Stephen
Timoshenko of Stanford University, and his brother the economist
Volodymyr Timoshenko of the same institution, and Professor Alexander
Granovsky, an entomologist, of the University of Minnesota. Professor
Dmytro Doroshenko of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague paid
several visits to Canada. All of these men were very active in arousing
interests in Ukrainian culture as were the choral leader, Alexander
Koshits, and the sculptor, Alexander Archipenko.
There were also a few young men of Slavic origin, born and educated in
the United States, who devoted themselves to Russian fields. Among them
was Leo Pasvolsky who worked for many years at the Brookings Institute
in Washington and was the son of one of the foremost Russian editors in
the pre-war United States. Yet the situation was so discouraging that
relatively few of the really young emigres who came to the United States
after 1918 and secured an education went into Slavic studies. They
usually chose some other field and gradually lost all practical
influence in the extension of Slavic culture, though in a few cases they
did some unofficial work in their own languages.
The situation in the languages and cultures of the liberated Slavic
countries was very different. The restoration of the independence of
Czechoslovakia and Poland and the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) involved the “Slavonization” of
many institutions that formerly had been under German and Austrian
control. As a result, there was a strong call for professors in those
lands and very few of the outstanding men came to America during the
early years. When they did, it was usually for a limited time, a
semester or perhaps a full year, and the funds for this purpose were
often supplied by the Slavic community in the neighborhood. Thus the
Poles of Detroit brought Professor Thaddeus Mitana to the University of
Michigan. This had been intended as the beginning of a Polish chair, but
the attempt broke down and Professor Mitana remained at Alliance
College, the institution of the Polish National Association. Professor
Roman Dyboski of the University of Krakow was likewise brought to the
University of Chicago for a period, but his lectures were not connected
in any sense with the work of Professor Harper. In 1928, Professor
Otakar Vocadlo of the University of Bratislava spent almost a full year
lecturing throughout the United States. All this did much to promote an
appreciation of Slavic scholarship, but since most of the visitors were
in technical and scientific fields they did not increase interest in
distinctively Slavic subjects.
Many of these visits were arranged through the Institute of
International Education which, as part of an international policy,
brought to the United States not only professors on lecture tours but
many students from the Slavic lands. The same institute also
administered a series of fellowships, usually for advanced study, which
were chiefly offered to Americans of Czech and Slovak parentage by the
Czechoslovak Ministry of Education. A similar program among the Poles
was carried on by the distinctively Polish-American Kosciuszko
Foundation begun in 1926. It was able to take many American Polish
students to Poland by offering them not only free tuition but also
greatly reduced rates on the Polish-American line steamships.
During the 1920’s those American universities most interested in Slavic
subjects developed rather independently. In the field of history, there
were few real innovations. During the twenties, and especially during
the period of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, a few young men were
able, on fellowships from various institutions, to study in the Soviet
universities and familiarize themselves with conditions there. Among
these men we may mention two important scholars of the present time:
Professor Philip Mosely of the American Council of Foreign Relations,
formerly of Columbia University, and Professor Geroid T. Robinson of
Columbia. Other men similarly visited other Slavic lands for varying
periods. Their studies have been an application of the accepted method
of historical research to the history of the Slavic countries by men who
were as well trained in Slavic as earlier generations had been in French
and German.
The situation was different in the field of language, literature and
culture, in the general sense of the word, for these subjects had been
very largely ignored in the earlier periods except in those institutions
where Slavic departments had been established. Even the masterpieces of
Russian literature had been handled purely on the basis of translations,
with few efforts to equate them with the general life of Russia. This
had produced the jaundiced view of Russian literature satirized by
Stephen Leacock of McGill University. In fact during a large part of the
period between the wars, one of the largest groups of students of Slavic
literature were persons who had no desire to learn the language or to
read Slavic literature in the original. They were merely interested in
including Russian in courses of comparative literature, or they were
instructors obliged to treat some of the Russian masterpieces in
translation.
This broad cultural need was met in different ways by the various Slavic
departments. Thus, during these years, the department at the University
of California, under Professor George Rapall Noyes, decidedly stressed
the development of translation, and courses in which a knowledge of
Russian was not primarily required. The department grew steadily but
largely maintained its original staff supplemented by visiting
lecturers. This policy continued until the eve of World War II. During
most of this time Professor Noyes did not make any special effort to
establish contacts with the Slavic groups on the Pacific coast.
The situation at Columbia University was different. Professor Clarence
A. Manning, who was acting department head during the twelve years which
Professor Prince spent in the American diplomatic service, tried to
continue the policy of Professor Prince in fostering a study of all the
Slavic languages and in establishing contacts with the Slavic
communities in the New York area. In terms of administration, the chief
development was the transfer of most instruction in the Slavic languages
from the faculty of philosophy, where it had originated, to the Columbia
Extension Teaching, later revamped as the School of General Studies.
This school had been planned originally for adult education but as it
acquired a special form it furnished a convenient vehicle for many
years, for giving language instruction. For some years it conducted a
series of extramural courses, especially in Polish, as far away as
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
The first addition to what eventually became a full time staff was Mrs.
Elena T. Mogilat who, from 1922 until the eve of World War II, conducted
practically all the courses in the Russian language. In 1927, Arthur P.
Coleman, the first American of non-Slavic origin to receive a doctorate
in Slavic languages in the United States, was appointed Lecturer and
devoted himself chiefly to courses in Polish.
The rest of the staff, some of whom served for many years, was composed
chiefly of educated journalists employed on the Slavic papers in New
York or persons occupying responsible positions in various institutions
of learning and business. Almost without interruption, yearly courses
were given in Polish, Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croatian or Slovene. We
must specifically mention the courses in Albanian given by Nelo Drizari
who published, at this period, an Albanian-English grammar and a small
Albanian-English dictionary. Most of the students in these non-Russian
courses were second generation Slavs. Few of these ever worked toward
higher degrees.
During the twenties, most students for the doctorate were Russians or
persons of Russian descent who had come to the United States after the
Revolution seeking positions in the American educational world. Those
who took the master’s degree were largely of the second generation or of
non-Slavic origin.
The department made its most extensive efforts in 1929 in providing a
summer course on the history of all Slavic literatures. The lectures on
Russian were given by Prince D. S. Mirsky of the University of London;
on Czech, by Professor Otakar Vocadlo; on Polish, by Professor Kelly of
Dartmouth; and, on Yugoslav, by Dr. D. Subotic of the University of
London. One lecture on Bulgarian was prepared by Dimitar Shishmanov, the
son of the distinguished professor of Slavic philology at the University
of Sofia and a well-known Bulgarian author who was executed by the
Communists after World War II. The response of students was not
sufficient to justify the repetition of the experiment in the next
years, although the numbers exceeded anything achieved in England at
that time for similar programs.
At the time it was the idea of Professor Manning that the future of
Slavic studies, especially in those languages spoken by considerable
communities in the United States, lay in the development of interest and
support from those communities. This notion was, at the time, warmly
supported by Columbia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler and led to the
formation of an Institute of Polish Culture and an Institute of
Czechoslovak Studies. Both met with initial success but the depression
with its pressure upon the Slavic population of the United States, led
to a practical suspension of the institutes after the publication of a
Polish number of the American archaeological journal, _Art and
Archaeology_, and a translated _Anthology of Czechoslovak Poetry_
compiled in the United States and Canada.
On the return of Professor Prince in 1933, the name of the department
was changed to East European Languages and Professor Prince made a new
effort to realize his dream of founding something that would include all
of the peoples of Eastern Europe. It proved premature, once again. The
department underwent further change after the retirement of Professor
Prince. Then in the fall of 1938, Professor Max Vasmer of the University
of Berlin lectured for one semester; he was followed by Professor Boris
Unbegaun of the University of Strassburg. Still later Professor Karl
Menges was added to the faculty to give courses in Slavic and Altaic
philology.
In still a different field, Professor Manning and Dean Hawkes, of
Columbia College, were both active in the establishment of St.
Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary in New York, to train candidates
for the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church of North America. This
developed later into St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary and Theological
Academy. To this were invited many of the leading emigrant Russian
theologians from Paris and elsewhere.
The development at Harvard was somewhat different. Few changes were made
in the situation which existed prior to World War I, until the
retirement of Professor Wiener. Then in 1927 Professor Samuel Hazzard
Cross (born in 1891, A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard before 1917), rejoined
his alma mater and after some years of service in the German department
was made, in 1930, Professor of Slavic Languages. With the appointment
of Professor Cross, Slavic work at Harvard went through a new period of
development and expansion. Into the revised department Cross brought
Professor Ernest J. Simmons who had taken his doctorate in 1928 with a
study of English influence on Russian literature of the eighteenth
century. A larger staff of Russian assistants was also engaged.
Professor Cross, who had translated the _Russian Primary Chronicle_,
stressed the older period of Russian literature, perhaps because of his
Germanic interests. He also became the managing editor of _Speculum_,
the organ of the Mediaeval Academy of America. In his interest in the
medieval period, Professor Cross was not alone in Harvard for from the
School of Architecture came the work of Professor Kenneth J. Conant on
St. Sofia Cathedral in Kiev and from the English department the work by
Francis P. Magoun, Jr. on the spreading in East Slavic lands of the
medieval _gestes_ of Alexander.
During the following years, Professor Cross became the center of the
developing Slavic activity, which was not limited to Harvard, but which
was responsible for the publication of various works in connection with
the Pushkin Centennial in 1937. The death of Cross in 1946 was a great
loss to American-Russian scholarship.
Still another attempt to promote Slavic studies was made at the
University of Pittsburgh by the establishment of national rooms in the
Cathedral of Learning to serve as centers for the national interests of
the students. The Slavic communities, in and around the city, were urged
to provide funds to furnish these rooms in native style and appeals were
frequently made to the governments of the Slavic countries to help in
the work.
In 1927 also, Professor Michael Karpovich, joined the faculty at Harvard
as Professor of Russian History. Professor Karpovich had been trained as
a lawyer and diplomat in Russia before the Revolution of 1917 and he
soon became a leading spokesman for the Russian liberal groups in the
United States and in America’s scholarly communities.
At the end of World War I, it was proposed that a scientific society be
established to unite Slavic scholars. The constitution and practice of
existing organizations in history seemed sufficiently broad to include
the professors of those subjects but a more complicated situation
prevailed in the fields of language and literature.
Consequently, in 1919, there was organized the Society for the
Advancement of Slavonic Study. The nucleus of this group was Slavs from
various organizations, especially Czechs and Yugoslavs. The first
president was Miss Sarka B. Hrbkova who had come to New York from
Nebraska after the dissolution of the department at the state university
there. The secretary was Leon Zelenka Lerando of Lafayette College. A
few meetings were held in 1922 with the final one at Columbia. The
society did not prove to be a success, however, largely because of the
inability of the founders to realize the aims of the society. It
published a few numbers of a bulletin but the addresses at the meetings
were made largely under the mistaken impression that the “findings” of
the society would pass for final pronunciamentos on many of the most
disputed subjects of Slavic scholarship. It must be confessed, also,
that many of these “findings” were based upon the political decisions
made at Versailles and previously advanced by movements such as the
Czechoslovak National Committee. As a result, the organization rapidly
lost standing and it very soon ceased to exist.
Yet the seed which it had sown was not entirely wasted. In 1922,
Professor Manning discussed with the Modern Language Association the
possibility of organizing the scholars of Slavic languages and
literatures under its auspices. From the very beginning, the attitude of
Professor Manning and the other founders was to avoid the difficulties
that had arisen earlier between the Association and the Society for the
Advancement of Slavonic Study. The first meeting, under the chairmanship
of Professor Manning, was poorly attended and some of the papers read
were decidedly amateurish; but the group continued. During the
intervening years, the original group has been developed into two: one
for Slavic literatures and one for Slavic philology. The attendance is
composed of members of the Association who are either actively or
passively interested in Slavic studies. This is very different from the
early years when it became necessary to do everything possible to secure
an audience for the few persons who ventured to submit papers. During
the early years, Professor Manning remained as chairman and the
secretary was usually chosen from one of the representatives of the
Slavic communities who had shown some interest in the undertaking. Now
the posts of chairman and secretary are rotated, more or less regularly,
and most professors of Slavic in the country have filled a position at
least once. Even so, the group has not sufficiently developed to apply
for recognition as a section parallel to those for English, Romance and
Germanic. Despite this, one of its members, Professor Ernest J. Simmons,
has been elected to the post of Director of the Modern Language
Association for one term.
A somewhat different development came in the foundation of the _Slavonic
Review_ by Professor Sir Bernard Pares and Professor R. W. Seton-Watson
at the University of London in 1922. From the beginning, this journal,
the first purely scholarly Slavic journal in English, had as American
co-editors, Professor Harper, Professor Noyes and Professor Kerner, then
at the University of Missouri. In 1923, once the journal was fairly
launched, Professor Seton-Watson came to the United States in the hope
of dissuading American Slavists from starting a competing journal. The
proposal was broached at a meeting of the American Historical
Association in Richmond, Virginia, but was decidedly disapproved by some
of those present, and the idea was tacitly dropped without prejudice to
the cooperation between the scholars of the two countries.
In a somewhat different vein, mention should be made of the monthly
magazine _Poland_. This was started in 1919 by the Polish Legation in
Washington at the suggestion of the Baldwin Locomotive Works which had
taken a prominent part in the rehabilitation of the Polish railroads
after World War I. The Baldwin company furnished the permanent staff, an
editor, Paul Le Tallec, a young Frenchman, and Eric Lord as business
manager. The journal received a subsidy from the Legation. It was
started purely as a trade journal, but Le Tallec had other views. Under
Clarence Dawson, who succeeded Paul Le Tallec as editor, it rapidly
developed into a general magazine covering all aspects of Polish life,
art and literature, as well as economics and business. The journal
proved successful for over ten years but when Dawson resigned as editor,
it began to fail. The magazine changed its character considerably and
finally, in the early thirties, was allowed to lapse.
It was during this same decade that energetic work was done in building
the libraries of various institutions. Even before the Russian
Revolution, the Library of Congress had acquired a large, uncatalogued
collection of Russian books and the New York Public Library developed a
very large and extensive Russian department. There were large Russian
collections at both Harvard and Yale. At Columbia, the Russian
collections prior to 1914 were negligible, while at the University of
California, Professor Noyes had specialized largely in translations of
Russian literature. Most of the institutions took advantage of the large
number of Russian books that were thrown upon the market after the
Soviet Revolution and purchased whole libraries from emigres and other
sources.
The Columbia collections were increased by the gift of a large library
on Russian literature, collected for many years by Dr. Samuel Abel, a
graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It numbered several
thousand volumes. The establishment of the Hoover War Library at
Stanford University brought to that institution a vast amount of
material, especially concerning Slavic countries, that had been
collected by American Relief workers, under the direction of Herbert
Hoover.
We must also mention the work that developed at Georgetown University
under the direction of Father Edmund Walsh who had served in Russia
after the Revolution. Work was done in the various schools but
especially in the School for Foreign Service of which Father Walsh was
the founder. Georgetown’s example was seconded by the continual
improvement in the standards of other institutions such as that of the
Czech Benedictines at Lisle, Illinois, and further, by the
establishment, in 1933, of such institutions as St. Basil’s College in
Stamford, Connecticut, by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Exarchate of
Philadelphia.
There was also a large number of Slavic books and translations from
Slavic in the public library in Cleveland, Ohio, where Mrs. Eleanor
Ledbetter had worked long and hard with the Slavic groups in that city.
Thus, by the outbreak of World War II, there were in the United States a
considerable number of libraries that were fairly adequate in nearly all
the centers where Slavic subjects were treated with the importance that
they deserved.
In 1931 work in Russian literature in English was also started at the
University of Washington, in Seattle, by Ivar Spector. In 1943, a course
in Russian history was added. In addition to these courses, Professor
Spector did considerable lecturing before various groups interested in
Russian affairs. The interest in Seattle is especially noticeable
because of the possible contacts with Siberia across the Pacific Ocean.
Whatever contact is had with the Soviet Union comes almost inevitably
through the seacoast cities on the Pacific Ocean. The same motives have
led to a strengthening of Russian work in the other California
universities, the University of California at Los Angeles and the
University of Southern California.
Strange to say, the recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933 by the
United States did not produce a marked increase in interest in Russian
Slavic affairs. Student interest flagged and it was soon evident that
the need for Russian in the business world would not at all parallel the
situation which a few years earlier had sparked the great development in
Spanish studies.
The years of the depression, in many ways, produced another period of
marking time in Slavic studies. For the most part efforts of the Slavic
groups to introduce their languages into the American educational system
were retarded, while available finances were restricted to relief
purposes. In other cases, as among the Czechs, the hardships were
complicated by the death of such leaders as Reverend Vincent Pisek and
Professor Michael Pupin who had been active in stimulating cooperation
between the immigrant communities and the American educational system.
Their deaths at a critical period disrupted much of the work. Further,
the 1931 failure of the Bank of Europe Trust company in New York under
conditions which almost completely reimbursed the depositors,
nonetheless lessened the effectiveness of Thomas Capek, a leader in the
work. Similar disasters in other Slavic groups had similar nation-wide
effects and except for an effort to interest the Czech population in the
Chicago area to establish courses at the University of Illinois, the
period was destitute of that type of energetic development which, on the
eve of the depression, promised to bear such rich fruits.
In a lighter vein came the establishment of courses in Russian under the
NRA. It had been hoped by some that it might be possible to give relief
to at least some of the unemployed Russians by the establishment of free
courses in the language. The attempt was almost completely a failure.
The students lacked any serious desire to learn the language and the
instructors were no more anxious to teach it. One very well educated
Russian actually prepared a set of charts on Russian grammar which
purported to show that there were no exceptions to any syntactical rule
in Russian and he blandly presented to his class word forms that he knew
never existed even in the speech of the most illiterate. When he was
reprimanded, he calmly told the NRA supervisors that he knew that none
of his students intended to learn Russian, he wanted his money, and so
there was no reason to worry about what, or how he taught.
In 1934, a new development emerged which was to prove exceedingly
fruitful in later years. Largely under the influence of Professors Cross
and Patrick, a small sum of money was secured to establish an intensive
summer course in Russian for about 20 students. The course was held at
Harvard University the first year and was directly under the control of
Professor Patrick who had come from the University of California to
conduct it with the aid of some assistants. The experiment was
successful. In 1935, joint sessions were held at Columbia University and
were to a certain degree independent of the regular summer school
courses. Professor Patrick was assisted by Mrs. Mogilat of Columbia and
Dr. Jack A. Posin of the University of California. After 1935, the
course was held at the University of California, largely because of the
increasing illness of Professor Patrick.
The session at Columbia was attended by two regular officers of the
United States Army, Major Frank L. Hayne and Lieutenant (later Brigadier
General) Joseph A. Michela. Their attendance was made possible by the
efforts of Colonel Burnett, officer in charge of the Military Attache
Service, who, having served several terms as United States Military
Attache in Japan, insisted that officers assigned to such posts as
Moscow and Tokyo have a speaking and reading knowledge of the local
language. This had been the case of Colonel Philip Faymonville, the
first Army man to be sent to Moscow after the restoration of diplomatic
relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. In a sense, it
was almost the beginning of serious language work by the United States
Armed Services. Both Hayne and Michela later were military attaches in
Moscow, although Hayne was transferred to Finland during the
Soviet-Finnish War. Michela remained in Moscow during the greater part
of the War and participated in the removal of the capital to Kuybyshev
when the Germans approached Moscow in the summer of 1941. At Columbia,
these officers had special courses during a two year period. In the
second year they were joined by Captain Ivan Yeaton, who had previously
served during World War I in the Siberian Expedition under General
Graves. Other officers were later added to the group but as World War II
approached, the entire project was transferred to Harvard University.
The thirties also witnessed the beginning of a systematic interest in
Russian studies by the American Council of Learned Societies. This group
had previously considered the need for developing studies in specialized
fields and had approached foundations to secure money for limited
projects. It had been successful in fostering work in Chinese and in
completing at least a preliminary survey of American resources in the
field. It then turned its attention to Russian and established a
committee to study the general status of Russian studies. Professor
Cross was secretary of this important committee for several years.
Through the activities of the American Council, coordination of work by
the various universities and colleges, was accomplished. This was but
the beginning of a process which was to be greatly intensified during
the War.
In the thirties, the University of Wisconsin began to offer courses in
Polish. Elaborately planned, Professor Joseph Birkenmeyer from the
University of Krakow was invited to direct the work. Unfortunately, he
returned to Poland just on the eve of World War II, but the work was
continued successfully.[37] The department at Wisconsin was established
primarily through the influence of the Polish population of the state.
When we consider the state of affairs as a whole on the eve of World War
II it is apparent that no important university or college had
established an adequate course in Slavic languages and literatures other
than those which had done so by the end of World War I. This does not
mean that the period between the wars was lost. The departments at all
the major centers were better equipped than they had been twenty years
before; they had larger libraries, better trained instructors and what
is more, they were attracting more serious students. Further, there
were, in the United States, a considerable number of men who had had
personal experience and acquaintance with the Slavic and adjacent
countries. There were real experts in almost every field of Slavic
studies and there had been a large output of books on the languages,
literatures and histories of the Slavic nations.
Of course, Russian predominated. Yet it is noteworthy that during the
twenties and thirties when American institutions were overrun with
would-be Communists, the Slavic departments, which might have seemed the
most vulnerable, somehow escaped with the least amount of trouble. They
had not taken sides in the fervent polemics of the period that were
carried on with more heat than light, and while there were a number of
men who had studied or visited the Soviet Union, few, if any, had become
seriously infected with Communism.
They had, however, continued to repeat the old traditional formulas set
out by Russian scholarship before the Revolution, arbitrarily neglecting
all aspects of the nationality problem in the Soviets, treating Russia
as a single unified country, without regard for the mixed elements of
her population or the Soviet division of the republics by an official
policy of differentiation between the peoples.
The most unsatisfactory aspect of the period concerned the non-Russian
Slavic tongues and histories. This was unfortunate, for it tended to
give instruction in the major centers a Russian, if not Soviet,
orientation, a fact which would cause repercussions in the following
period.
Among the Slavic communities, some leaders were beginning to understand
better the peculiar problems of the American educational system, and
though they had not yet come to cooperate actively, they were rapidly
becoming aware that there was serious work being done. Their own
institutions were improving. They were securing more American-trained
teachers, even if they were members of the groups, and many second
generation Slavs were rising to prominence.
Thus, the period represented a marked deepening, rather than an
expansion, of efforts. Slavic languages and history were no longer
considered merely artificial and exotic; the way was cleared for a
period of rapid expansion.
CHAPTER 7
SLAVIC STUDIES SINCE 1939
In the period of tension which followed the Munich Agreement of 1938,
the opening of World War II, and the period of Nazi-Soviet cooperation,
Slavic studies in the United States, as well as the studies of the
neighboring East European countries began to receive more serious
consideration. A period of more active interest began. Because
developments during World War II have continued since the ending of
hostilities, it is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between the
War and post-war period, largely because of the Cold War and the
establishment of the Iron Curtain or, better yet, the recognition that
there were tremendous gaps between the thinking of the Western free
world and the Soviet dominated areas.
On the surface, the reactions in 1939 differed little from those in
1914. This is well illustrated by the fact that at the annual opening
exercises of Columbia University in 1939, President Nicholas Murray
Butler repeated large extracts from his talk of 1914 on a similar
occasion. Yet, the attention of the American public was more sharply
focused on events in Eastern Europe than it had been in 1914 and the
colleges and universities during the preceding twenty-five years had
provided a larger nucleus of trained men. The events of the first months
showed, however, that far too many of these trained men were still bound
to the thinking of the past and were not prepared to take into account
recent developments on a global, and even on an East European, scale.
Such short-sightedness prevented adequate consideration of the situation
as it unfolded day by day.
The old myth that Russia was a single country inhabited by a single
people, with boundaries defined long ago, proved remarkably vital.
President Wilson’s formulation of a Russian policy in 1918, recognizing
the need of the Russian people to choose their own form of government,
was still accepted and even the colleges and universities paid little
attention to the structure of the Soviet Union as it saw itself. The
American people and their government continued to use the word Russian
as a synonym for Soviet Union and were puzzled, as they had been in
1917, by the movements that arose in the territory. As in 1917, Finland
stood out as a distinct nationality, but the popular reaction to the
annexation of the Baltic republics was marked as much by confusion as by
indignation. Supposed “experts” even found grim relief in the fact that
after 1939 the borders of Germany and “Russia” were touching and this
seemed to confirm the validity of the pre-1914 frontiers.
Thus the crisis tended to emphasize again the importance of Russian
history and the Russian language. In a sense this was justified. The
force of events had made the Russian language predominant in Eastern
Europe and the leaders of the USSR were almost exclusively Russian,
except the Georgian Stalin, who regularly espoused the Great Russian
cause for foreign consumption. All tendencies to stress the opponents of
Moscow and their cultures ended abruptly with the Nazi attack on the
Soviet Union and continued in the following period of Soviet-democratic
cooperation. Such emphasis on the Russian character of the USSR was
furthered by many of the Russian emigres, who at the height of the war,
were only too ready, whatever their political convictions, to serve the
cause of Mother Russia, a policy which was fostered by Stalin’s clever
use of Russian slogans.
Many British and American authorities zealously compared the German
attack on the Soviets in 1941 to the German advance in 1918 after the
Soviet Revolution. A bitter propaganda attack was started, both inside
and outside the universities, against all national groups from the old
Russian empire having separatist aspirations. The old equation that all
who were not pro-Communist were pro-Nazi was repeated, especially after
1941. The Ukrainians received the worst criticism but they were not
alone. Even though the United States government refused to recognize the
seizure of the Baltic states, President Roosevelt acceded to the demands
of Stalin and allowed him to sign the Atlantic Charter. They did not
grant this to the representatives of the occupied countries, lest they
break the friendship with that great anti-Nazi power—“Russia.” Under
such conditions, lectures arranged by Professor Manning at Columbia
University in the spring of 1941, with the aid of the Ukrainian National
Association and a number of distinguished professors of Eastern Europe,
evoked severe criticism from many anti-Nazi radio commentators who
followed the whims of popular sentiment.
The chief counterweight to this tendency was the arrival in the United
States of many distinguished scholars who had escaped the holocaust of
Nazi rule and the direct impact of Soviet power on Slavic scholarship.
The circumstances of the peaceful occupation of Prague in the spring of
1939 made it difficult, if not impossible, for many Czech professors to
leave. The chief exceptions were Professor Otokar Odlozilik and
Professor Roman Jakobson who were outside the country when the storm
struck.
The Poles were more fortunate, for during the crucial weeks of the
destruction of Poland, many of their leading scholars had been able to
escape north into Lithuania or south into Romania, from which countries
they made their way to the west. When they arrived in the United States,
the Polish organizations, working with the Polish Legation in
Washington, found funds to allow them to continue their scientific work.
To furnish a center for them and keep them from being lost in American
life, an American branch of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in
Krakow was formed under the distinguished historian, Professor Oskar
Halecki. This was later reorganized as the Polish Institute of Arts and
Sciences in the United States. During the war years, it received
sufficient funds to publish a quarterly journal, the _Bulletin of the
Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America_, and to issue several
scholarly works on Polish subjects. Still later, when the Germans pushed
westward, other Polish scholars, such as Professor Waclaw Lednicki and
Professor Manfred Kridl, succeeded in reaching the United States. Most
of these men have since found places in the American scientific world.
Few distinguished Russian scholars arrived at this time and there was
only one Ukrainian, Professor Nicholas Chubaty, who almost by accident,
arrived in the United States for a meeting of _Pax Romana_, an
international organization for social action under the auspices of the
Catholic Church, and remained here after the outbreak of hostilities.
The Southern Slavs and Bulgarians fared even less well.
War produced, at first, relatively little effect upon Slavic studies as
a whole or Russian in particular. It was not until 1940 that there came
any appreciable increase in the number of students. Yet the general
reaction of the public differed from that of 1914. Despite the growth of
anti-Nazi and even anti-German feeling, there was no attempt to exclude
German from the curricula of any important institution. There was no
decline of students, but rather an increase. The same was true of
Russian, and long before 1941, the governing bodies of institutions
without Slavic departments began to think of introducing them. We can
only mention certain instances of this development.[38]
Professor Alfred Senn, a Swiss philologist from the University of
Kaunas, who held several positions in other institutions, became
Professor of German Philology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1938.
During World War II, he offered courses in Russian, and in 1948 became
Professor of Balto-Slavic Philology and head of the Department of
Balto-Slavic Studies. As such, he was able to group around him a number
of refugee scholars.
In 1939, Cornell University invited Dr. Jack Posin to teach Russian and
in 1941 named Ernest J. Simmons Assistant Professor of English and
Russian. In 1942 Simmons was named chairman of a newly established
department of Russian, and, in 1945, was promoted to a full
professorship. Dr. Posin, meanwhile had transferred to the University of
Iowa, in 1942, as Assistant Professor of Russian.
At Syracuse University, Professor Albert Menut of the Department of
Romance Languages, a student of Russian, was able to develop courses in
Russian and to inaugurate a Russian program.
The extent of Slavic development during this period is revealed in a
survey conducted by Professor Arthur P. Coleman in 1945, which showed
eighty-one institutions offering courses in Russian and eleven in
Polish. At the same time, there were 147 schools and colleges offering
courses in Slavic history and culture. The increased interest in history
seems all to the good, but it can be noted that well over fifty
institutions offering work on Russian and Slavic subjects lacked
collateral courses in the languages. This, however, was a far smaller
proportion than existed in 1914. Furthermore, it was not a peculiarity
of the United States, for as late as 1924 in Germany there were
professors of East European history who looked askance at students
wasting their time on linguistic studies, for they preferred to have
them work from translations.
To secure a staff for the American expansion, particularly in Russian,
offered many difficulties. There had been almost no immigration of
Russians for many years and the bulk of the possible instructors were
persons who had come to the United States shortly after World War I.
These were the only ones with any special training, for during the
period between the wars, few young Russians from educated families had
seriously considered doing advanced work in Russian, even though there
were many with knowledge of the educational system. An outstanding
exception was Oleg Maslenikov who, at this time, joined the staff of the
University of California.
The chief emphasis, in this period of expansion, was on a speaking
knowledge of the language. Wherever it was possible, instruction was
begun under the supervision of some member of the faculty with a
knowledge of Russian, while much of the actual work was done by native
assistants. This combination, originally applied to Russian by Professor
Patrick, became the general rule and was successful where it was
intelligently used.
Unlike the situation in World War I, the United States government
actively encouraged these studies and assigned draftees as well as
volunteers to special units for the study of languages, and special
language schools were established for the Armed Services throughout the
country. This created still another problem. Wartime conscription
reduced the number of students alarmingly causing nearly all colleges
and universities to become dependent upon government funds for their
continued functioning. The larger institutions, with their highly
developed laboratories and opportunities for scientific training,
received most of the students to be trained in technical subjects. The
government, therefore, often opened language centers in smaller
institutions, many of which lacked necessary libraries and, in some
localities, secured a proper staff of instructors only with difficulty.
Thus, Bulgarian was assigned to the University of Denver, which was
fortunate to find in that city an educated Bulgarian lady. She agreed to
help, although she had never seriously considered teaching Bulgarian,
and was compelled to prepare most of her materials from original
Bulgarian texts which she owned.
With the reduction of the armed forces after the War, many of these
courses were suspended, although both the Navy and Air Force still send
selected students to various universities. The Army, however, has
established its own language school at the Presidio of Monterey. With a
well selected civilian faculty, many of them former members of
university staffs, this is rapidly becoming one of the best institutions
of its kind for the study of the Slavic as well as other languages. It
is preparing, for its own use, its own courses and it promises to become
an important testing ground for Slavic and East European studies. In
addition to this, Russian has been introduced into the curriculum of
such service academies as West Point, where the work which was
tentatively started after World War I is now on a definite and secure
basis.
This period, too, saw the beginning of the organization of the so-called
area studies. In these, the history, geography and economics of the
given area are stressed. Such efforts represent an attempt to overcome
the gaps which have developed between historical, literary and cultural
studies through the departmentalizing of institutions. But as they have
developed, historical and economic elements have been stressed more than
cultural and literary. This was perhaps natural. However, during the
War, at the height of the enthusiasm for the USSR, studies of this kind
tended to accent the Soviet version of the relations between the
nationalities of the Soviet Union, and the old Russian concept of a
single Russian people. There was thus, a perpetuation of the previous
confusion in American thinking; and, it was not overcome even when the
Ukrainian and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics were included
as charter members in the United Nations.
The greatest single deterrent to Slavic study was the almost
simultaneous death of nearly all the older leaders of Slavic
scholarship. To list but a few of the more prominent: Professor John
Dyneley Prince, who had retired from Columbia in 1937, died in 1945 at
the age of 77; Professor Alexander Kaun, of the University of
California, died at the age of 55 in 1944; Professor George Z. Patrick,
of the same institution, died at the age of 63 in 1945; Professor Henry
Lanz, of Stanford, died in 1945 at the age of 59; Professor Samuel
Hazzard Cross, of Harvard, died in 1944 at the age of 55.[39] Thus,
within three years practically all the older men in the field of Slavic
literature died except Professor George Rapall Noyes and Professor
Manning. The losses in history were not so severe but Professor Samuel
N. Harper, of the University of Chicago, died in 1943 at the age of 61.
As a result Professor Robert J. Kerner, for many years at the University
of California, was the only person remaining in the field of history who
had become prominent before 1914. This, in a sense, sharply delineates
the earlier period of Slavic studies. Today the leaders of Slavic
scholarship belong definitely to a different generation, one which is
certainly better trained but does not necessarily have the range of
interests which often marked the older men.
Another, somewhat different, development needs to be noted. During the
first years of the War, when England was severely strained by the war
and the bombing of her cities, it seemed that the _Slavonic and East
European Review_ would be compelled to suspend publication. To meet the
crisis it was decided that the journal would continue under the
direction of the American contributing editors. Thus, until his untimely
death, Professor Cross was the practical editor of the magazine,
assisted by Professor Leonid I. Strakhovsky. Issues appeared with both
an American and British volume number. After the War when the British
expressed a desire to resume publication, the American editors expanded
their numbers and, with the aid of the Joint Committee on Slavic
Studies, established the American Association for the Advancement of
Slavic Studies to publish _The American Slavic and East European
Review_. The present committee of scholars in charge of the publication
is Professor Abram Bergson of Harvard; Professor George B. Cressey of
Syracuse; Professor H. H. Fisher of Stanford; Professor Alexander
Gerschenkron of Harvard; Professor Oskar Halecki of Fordham University;
Professor Roman Jakobson of Harvard; Professor Michael Karpovich of
Harvard; Professor Robert J. Kerner of California; Professor W. Lednicki
of California; Professor Philip Mosely of the Council for Foreign
Relations; Professor Geroid Robinson of Columbia; Professor Alfred Senn
of the University of Pennsylvania; Professor Ernest J. Simmons of
Columbia; Professor S. H. Thomson of the University of Colorado;
Professor George Vernadsky of Yale, and Professor Francis J. Whitfield
of the University of California. Nothing better illustrates the way in
which Slavic studies has developed than this list, for the overwhelming
majority of these scholars represent those institutions where
departments had existed before World War I.
_The American Slavic and East European Review_ is the leading
publication in the United States for Slavic studies. However, other
journals, such as the _Publication of the Modern Language Association_,
_Speculum_, the _Journal of Central European History_ (edited by
Professor S. H. Thomson) and the _Journal of East European History_
(edited by the University of Chicago), also contain specialized
articles. As a matter of fact, there are very few of the more
specialized journals which during the past years have not included
articles on some aspect of the East European historical and cultural
world.
There are also several quarterlies published in the United States which
deal with East Europe. Among these are: _The Russian Review_, edited by
Professor D. von Mohrenschildt of Dartmouth College, originally founded
with the aid of the Russian Student Fund; the _Ukrainian Quarterly_,
edited by Professor Nicholas Chubaty for the Ukrainian Congress
Committee of America; and, the _Polish Review_, published by the Polish
Institute of Arts and Sciences in America. We may also place here the
_Armenian Review_, edited by Mr. Reuben Darbinian for the Hairenik
Association (Boston, Mass.). These are scholarly journals devoted to the
language, culture and history of the people for whom they are compiled,
which cannot be overlooked in any survey of the intellectual output for
East European subjects. There are also many smaller organs and bulletins
of societies, often with world wide connection, which serve a more
specialized political program. They are important for their frequent
opposition to the accepted viewpoint of history and culture, but are
essentially more political than scholarly in its content. As has been
stressed again and again, Slavic studies have developed so largely under
the influence of the imperial Russian and German traditions that truth
has often seemed to be merely what was decided in pre-World War I St.
Petersburg and Berlin.
The Slavic group of the Modern Language Association of America is still
the leading scientific center for philologists and students of
literature in the broadest sense of the word. It holds a yearly meeting,
concurrent with the Modern Language Association, and is divided into two
parts, literary and philological. It offers the best possibilities for
the developing of personal contacts among more serious students. In time
it should become a section parallel to that of the English, Romance and
Germanic sections but the day when there are sufficient members is still
in the future.
For many years there was no special section in the American Historical
Association and its allied societies, devoted to the study of Slavic or
East European history. This did not mean that the subject was ignored,
for numerous papers were included in the regular program and, many times
there were entire meetings devoted to Slavic problems. However, in 1955
a special conference on Slavic and East European studies was formed to
provide continuity and concentration in the subject. This activity will
undoubtedly expand in future years.
Another organization serving Slavic scholars is the American Association
of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, formed by Professor
Arthur P. Coleman, formerly of Columbia University and now president of
Alliance College. Founded in 1941 to parallel such groups as the
American Association of Teachers of German, this organization exists to
bring together teachers of the subject, rather than to promote research.
The association is divided both by languages and by localities. It has
appealed to many emigre scholars, and this has led it to a more definite
anti-Communist position than many other groups, which have often leaned
over backward to appear impartial and unprejudiced. It has now
established the _Slavic and East European Journal_.
The ranks of emigre scholars, which had started to grow with the arrival
of many Poles in 1939, were augmented after 1945 by the arrival of many
displaced persons. These men, for the most part Ukrainians and often of
considerable intellectual stature, found themselves in an unenviable
position chiefly because of their inability to speak English. The
majority were already mature or even elderly. They had escaped the
holocaust caused by that interpretation of the Yalta agreements which
had led to the forcible return of many refugees to the Soviet Union.
However, they were aided by their own ability to make the most of
opportunities given them by the freakish events of the last months of
the War in Europe. In and out of the DP camps, they had created their
own scholarly groups in Germany and Austria. Thus, the Ukrainian Free
University which had been established first in Vienna and then moved to
Prague after World War I, was now reopened in Munich. An UNRRA
university was started in the same city. A less formal Baltic university
was established in Hamburg in the British zone. At one time there were
plans to transfer this latter institution to Canada, but the plan
miscarried. However, many of the leading professors of these
institutions have come to the United States and Canada and are being
absorbed into the American educational world. In the beginning, many of
these men were compelled to take non-intellectual positions. Others
found places in institutions (usually Catholic, of either the Western or
Eastern Rites) educating their compatriots, at schools such as Alliance
College, and the Ukrainian Catholic St. Basil’s College in Stamford,
Connecticut.[40]
In addition to these institutions, the displaced persons opened many
more elementary schools on all educational levels to train their fellow
countrymen whose education had been interrupted by the War and the
limitations imposed on general education, both by the Soviets and the
Nazis.
By a series of fortunate coincidences, the majority of the
administration of the old Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, and a
large part of its membership were saved in the DP camps. There, this
society, which had been suppressed by the Soviets in 1939 after their
occupation of Lviv, was again revived under the same officers in Munich.
The center was later moved to Sarcelles near Paris. Many of its members
have come to the United States, and while the headquarters are still in
Sarcelles, American and Canadian branches have been established in New
York and Toronto and are working actively, publishing the results of
their studies in both Ukrainian and English.
At about the same time, other Ukrainians in the camps, perhaps more
often from eastern Ukraine, formed the Ukrainian Free Academy of
Sciences. Its members have also come, in numbers, to America and are
functioning in New York and Winnipeg. They publish the quarterly
_Annals_ in English, greatly aided by the East European Fund set up by
the Ford Foundation.
These two groups, which parallel the Polish Institute of Arts and
Sciences in America, have counterparts in the Francis Skorina Society
(Kryvian), and the White Ruthenian Institute of Arts and Sciences in the
U.S., the Croatian Academy of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Serb
National University in Chicago. The Masaryk Institute, formed by a group
of Americans and Czechs before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, is
in a sense similar but it has also the features of the Kosciuszko
Foundation. It is too early to know what position these societies will
take in Slavic programs of the future, but their outstanding individuals
are securing recognition in American colleges and universities. Whether
they will ultimately form a branch of this general educational field or
whether they will develop into more highly specialized groups drawing
upon interested Americans of non-Slavic origin, cannot now be answered
with certainty. Some of them are undoubtedly ephemeral but some have had
a long cultural tradition and can be expected, in their new environment,
to exercise an influence out of proportion to their numbers.
Many of the newly arrived scholars are already playing an important role
in the development of Slavic studies and in the reorganization of some
of the older departments. It would take too long to list all who have
found important posts. Professor Oskar Halecki is developing the study
of Polish history at Fordham University. Professor Roman Smal-Stocki at
Marquette University has taken a prominent part in the formation of a
Slavic Institute there. By such publications as _The Nationality Problem
of the Soviet Union_, he is helping acquaint the American public with
the dangers of open, as well as secret, Communism in the United States,
besides exposing the inaccuracy of the American concept that all
citizens of the former Russian empire are Russians by blood, feeling and
culture. There is, in addition, the work of Professor George Shevelov in
comparative philology at Columbia University, and that of Professor
Dmytro Chyzhevsky at Harvard, which emphasizes the older Ukrainian
literature.
The rise of recently arrived Slavic scholars and the influence of
transplanted organizations of Slavic scholarship was earnestly needed by
American Slavic scholarship and, in fact was forced by the surprising
number of deaths during the war period. Development in the different
institutions has been conditioned, of course, by the general traditions
and spirit of each school. While growth has been rapid, it cannot be
said that all results have been unqualifiedly happy or successful,
partly because of the sporadic interest by both faculty and students in
the field as a whole. Slavic subjects (not to speak of the closely
associated non-Slavic languages like the Ural-Altaic groups, modern
Greek and Romanian, all of which have strong Slavic overtones) are
extremely broad and diverse. Yet for the average American student,
Slavic and Russian are too exclusively identified. Even interest in
Russian has been chiefly limited to either pure philology or, more
frequently, Russian literature of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
As an example, consider Columbia University’s efforts to secure a
balanced course. When Professor Ernest J. Simmons joined the staff, in
1946, as professor of Russian literature and Chairman of the Department
of Slavic Languages, as it was now renamed, he hoped to build a broad
program. The department was informally divided into four sections:
Slavic and Russian philology; Czech and Slovak; Polish, and South
Slavic. To help defray expenses, the university, reversing the policy
formulated by President Butler after the unpleasant developments of the
World War I period, sought from the lesser Slavic lands, a yearly
subsidy to pay the salary of a distinguished professor. This was easily
secured from both Poland and Czechoslovakia and Professor Roman Jakobson
was appointed the Thomas G. Masaryk Professor of Slavic Philology, and
Professor Manfred Kridl was named the Adam Mickiewicz Professor of
Polish. Arrangements were made without considering developments which
might be caused by the Communists, and similar agreements were made with
many countries of the Near and Middle East. The experiment was hardly
satisfactory. After the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the new regime
imposed such conditions that maintenance of the chair was impossible.
Poland more slowly followed the same course. Despite other arrangements
with less possible political interference, made by the university, the
number of students in the Czech, Slovak, Polish and South Slavic
sections of the department has been scarcely larger than it was between
the wars. There was no attempt, at Columbia, to break the traditional
separation between the faculties of philosophy and political science, or
establish a single department for all Slavic, or even all Russian,
instruction. Russian history, under Professor Geroid Robinson, continued
to develop as it had, just as other areas of study continued under the
faculty of political science.
Development at Harvard was somewhat different. There, after the interim
period following the death of Professor Cross, Professor Roman Jakobson
came to Cambridge in 1949, with a number of experts in Slavic fields. At
about the same time, work in all Slavic subjects was, at least
partially, consolidated and Professor Karpovich was named to the Curt
Hugo Reisinger Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures, in addition to
his work in history.
At the University of California development was severely affected by the
death of Professors Patrick and Kaun, until the staff was rebuilt by the
appointment of Professor Gleb Struve and Waclaw Lednicki, and the
promotion of Professor Oleg Maslenikov.[41] There was no attempt to
integrate the work in history under Professor Robert J. Kerner, although
the department broadened with an increase of students.
In the same period, Slavic studies at Catholic universities, especially
those administered by the Society of Jesus, have been greatly
strengthened. While Georgetown University, alone, achieved standing in
language instruction following World War I, the situation has changed
since World War II and Fordham, Notre Dame, and Marquette are all
setting new standards in the range of courses offered and in the
thoroughness of their work. These institutions have also contributed by
studying the contrasts and similarities between the Russian Empire and
the Soviet Union, with emphasis on the nationality problem of
Russia-USSR. Numerous conferences have been held and addresses have been
published.
Marquette University, located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where there is a
considerable population of Slavic descent, has established a Slavic
Institute under the direction of Professor Roman Smal-Stocki. In the
announcement of its first publication, _The Doctrine of Anarchism of
Michael A. Bakunin_, the Institute stated its goal:
... to strengthen the knowledge of Slavic matters and problems in
America through this special series of monographs on Slavic nations,
their history, culture, civilization and their great personalities.
Simultaneously we would like to cultivate through original research,
the Slavic heritage of more than twelve million of America’s
citizens. According to our anniversary motto, we dedicate the series
to the “Pursuit of Truth to Make Men Free” and in this spirit we
shall approach all Slavic nations, large and small, with a deep
sense of their fundamental equality, disregarding all Slavic
imperialisms and colonialisms, and with a warm respect for their
fine heritage, which has become a component part of our American
culture and civilization.
Scholarly purposes of this sort, which respect the culture of the Slavic
peoples apart from political dominations, and the avowal to study
changes of Slavic culture in the New World, bid fair to mark a new era
for such studies.
Leading American colleges as a whole have introduced Russian into their
curricula. Most courses are taught by men trained while in American
government service during World War II, who have continued their
preparation in graduate programs at one of the longer established Slavic
departments.[42]
Much of the recent development in Slavic scholarship must be credited to
the work of the Joint Committee on Slavic Studies. Started before World
War II by the American Council of Learned Societies, a committee was
established in the Slavic area, based on the prototype which existed to
aid the reorganization and development of studies in Chinese. Later the
Social Science Research Council established a committee for the
development of Slavic studies in the social sciences. The committees of
these organizations combined to form the Joint Committee, which was able
to secure large subsidies from foundations for the development of
courses, faculty salaries and scholarship grants.
The initiative of this committee, working with influential and alert
university officials, has aided the expansion of wartime area studies
into institutes, organized programs and centers of research and
training. This approach to academic organization is, in a sense,
borrowed from European university organization which used institutes,
such as the Slavic Institute in Prague, as a means of coordinating the
activities of previously isolated chairs. In the United States, where
the organization of courses led to the establishment of cohesive
departments, the institutes became a means of coordinating departments
which were in different faculties, sometimes in isolation and even
competition, especially in courses on national cultures which almost of
necessity impinge on history.
In addition, the institutes had a more practical side, for along with
the development of pure research, they aspired to supply trained men and
women for special technical work in both government and civilian
enterprises. We can scarcely summarize this activity better than by
quoting the purposes of the Russian Institute as reported in the
Announcement of the Faculty of Philosophy of Columbia University, for
1957 (p. 146):
The Russian Institute, established in 1946 with the assistance of
the Rockefeller Foundation, has two major objectives: the
development of _research_ in the social sciences and the humanities,
as they relate to Russia, and the training of a limited number of
well-qualified Americans for scholarly or professional careers, as
Russian-Soviet specialists in business, in finance, in journalism,
in various branches of government service, and in academic research
and teaching in the social sciences and in literature. It is
believed that such prospective specialists should acquire (a) a
broad and thoroughly integrated knowledge of Russia and the Soviet
Union; (b) command of a well-developed specialty in a selected
academic discipline, as applied to that country; and (c) a broad
training in the more general aspects of this selected discipline. To
this end, each candidate for the two year certificate will pursue
certain survey courses on Russia, while giving special emphasis,
within the Institute, to one of five fields: Russian history,
economy, government and law, foreign relations, the social and
ideological aspects of literature. At the same time, the candidate
will be expected to follow outside the Institute, a parallel program
of work in the graduate school or department of the University that
is most closely allied with his Russian specialty within the
Institute.
All of these institutes, wherever they have been founded and whether
they are Institutes, Studies or Programs have been faced with the same
fundamental dilemma: how is the term “Russia” to be defined? A certain
number of scholars, who have been labeled by Professor Lev Dobriansky of
Georgetown University as the “Russia Firsters,” have stubbornly insisted
that it was their duty to devote themselves to the study of Russia in
the traditional sense of the word, i.e. the consideration of Russian
culture, history and economics without regard to the linguistically and
culturally heterogeneous character of the old Russian empire. To
students of this school, every person within the old Russian empire is a
Russian, whether their studies concern economics or concentration camps.
They refuse to separate the statistics in any way that might show
increased pressure on the non-Russian peoples by the Soviet government.
They feel themselves free to do this, even though Stalin himself after
World War II specifically attributed the victory of the Soviet Union to
the loyalty of the Great Russians, i.e. Russians in the narrower sense
of the word.
This attitude, despite the prominence of its supporters, has been
steadily opposed by those students who stress the cultural and
linguistic differences which existed in the old Russian empire as well
as in the modern Soviet Union. These students emphasize the similarities
between the Russian and Soviet concepts of dominance of the Great
Russians, and argue for a proper recognition of the oppressed nations of
the USSR who sought their independence during the Revolution and have
since been restrained by force of arms to adopt Communism. They
accordingly see in the restoration of the political independence of
these nations the best answer to the Communist menace to freedom. This
viewpoint has been expressed by Professor Roman Smal-Stocki, and by
James Burnham, formerly of the Department of Philosophy of New York
University, who in all his writings has stressed the need to eliminate
the new Russian Communism.
A further requirement of this in a historical survey is expressed by a
Russian in speaking of the failure of the anti-Communist movements
during the Civil Wars:
Those who were adverse to the new (Communist) regime could thus be
divided into two very different groups; one comprising the
property-owning classes (who had been deprived of their all by the
Bolsheviks), the officers, the civil servants and all those devoted
to the ideals of the Russian State as constituted before the October
Revolution; the other, the national separatist groups, which desired
complete separation from Russia. It is easy to see that, no matter
how antagonistic these two groups might be to Communism, their aims
were absolutely dissociated. The unity of the Russian State could
only be reestablished in one of two ways: either by a restoration of
the Monarchy or by federation. Neither alternative appealed to the
anti-Bolshevik groups; and this circumstance explains the absence of
cooperation in the Civil War which broke out in many parts of the
country in 1918. It must be noted also, that the majority of the
population, the peasantry, stood entirely aloof from the activities
of both groups, and remained during the initial stages of the Civil
War absolutely neutral.[43]
With the practical elimination of the monarchist influences, the line is
still drawn with the greatest bitterness between the so-called Russian
democratic elements who insist upon the unity of Russia and the
representatives of the non-Russian peoples, especially the Ukrainians,
Baltic, Caucasian and Turkestanian nations. During the first post-war
years this latter tendency was little regarded in the American
universities and even now is less well represented than it should be;
but recent years have seen the publication of several studies such as
John Reshetars’s _Ukrainian Revolution_ and John A. Armstrong’s
_Ukrainian Nationalism_ (1939–1943).
The same division can be seen in the distribution of aid, in the early
years, of the work of the East European Fund, Inc., which was created by
the Ford Foundation and has done much valuable work. In its later years
it has given more money to aid in the preparation and publication of
works by Ukrainian, Byelorussian and other scholars and is publishing a
series of Ukrainian texts, either original works or books suppressed by
the Soviet government. But all of these publishing activities fall far
short of the work of the Chekhov Publishing House which has issued over
100 Russian books and received for this, grants (up to 1954) totaling
$1,238,000. However, on the average, as shown by the Fund’s report for
1954, the grants to the several Ukrainian and Byelorussian
(Whiteruthenian) scholarly and relief institutions have never been more
than a third, at most, of that contributed for similar Russian purposes,
in spite of its stated position of refraining from “favoring or
supporting any single Russian political grouping.” The report shows how
the Fund has tended however to see more value in the Russian projects
than in the Ukrainian and Byelorussian (Whiteruthenian).[44]
Gradual changes of attitude can also be noted in the American-supported
publications of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich, which
is intended as a means for assistance to refugee scholars from the USSR,
and in the various American radio and other organizations intended to
aid in the fight against Communism, such as the American Committee for
Liberation from Bolshevism. It is to be noted also in the policy of
George Kennan, formerly of the State Department and now connected with
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who is
considered an outstanding American authority on the USSR. His entire
policy of “containment” has long been based on the same idea of Russian
unity as expressed by his uncle, George Kennan (See Chapter III).
To supplement these and similar tendencies in the study of the satellite
states menaced by Communism, there has been established in New York
another series of organizations to secure American help, to furnish
scholarly opportunities for displaced scholars from the countries
liberated after World War I and to assist in training new students. This
is the Mid-European Studies Center. Its counterparts in Europe are Radio
Free Europe and in the university field in the United States, the
Mid-European Studies Program at Columbia University. This is more or
less on the pattern of the Russian Institute and it is but one example
of the efforts that are being made to develop interest in the culture of
the satellite states, which, save for the efforts of their compatriots
in the United States, have been largely neglected.
A point often raised regarding studies in this area is the limitation
placed upon them by the American distrust of Communism which has
expressed itself in many Congressional investigations as well as the
public and private attempts to root out from the various important
fields open or secret Communists or fellow-travellers. This point is
raised by Professor James F. Clarke of the University of Indiana:[45]
In more recent times a similar blind emotional reaction to Communism
as well as partisan evaluations of the Soviet Union have constituted
a threat to the free and rational expansion of East European
studies. Today, college students, teachers, and administrators
interested in the area dominated by Communism, while they may not
yield to anti-Communist hysterics, must at the same time heed its
potential effect on parents, taxpayers, legislators, trustees and
employers.
It is the opinion of the present writer that such arguments serve merely
to cover the failure of the scholars to interpret the complications of
the Soviet mode of thought to an American audience. The Aesopian
language in which so much of the current Communist propaganda is
couched, both for home and foreign consumption, and the belief that
truth is what is best at the moment for the Communist Party, have laid a
responsibility upon students of Eastern Europe, a burden not borne by
the more established subjects where the sources are less subject to
deliberate falsification. In addition to this, certain men who followed,
during World War II, the tendency to gloss over the cruelties of the
Soviet Union on behalf of mutual understanding and a misinterpreted
liberalism now find it difficult to disavow some of their most
tendentious writings. This by no means implies that they are either
Communists or fellow-travellers but they deliberately closed their eyes
to unpleasant situations, and now shrink from admitting the full truth.
As we have noted above, few, if any, of the outstanding scholars of
Slavic have accepted Communist ideas. The burden of Communist
infiltration in the past, and in the present, has been in departments
and subjects that might be considered most immune to them, especially
some of the natural sciences which have only recently become subjects
for international intrigue and spying. For this reason, the fears of
being labeled a Communist are far less vital than the pressure that has
been exerted at many different periods to present Communism as a liberal
doctrine that is in harmony with American ideals. It is this misplaced
liberalism that has been responsible for what the author of the article
quoted calls “anti-Communist hysterics.”
In addition to this, any objective study of the Communist-dominated
world is rendered impossible, if the supplemental goal is to promote
mutual understanding. This of course is an object of study when the
system of two distinct peoples is founded upon the same general
principles, and when words are used on both sides with similar meanings.
In a study of the Communist world, far more can be effected by a
rigorous emphasis on the differences than can be gained by soft-pedaling
and concealing them.
Another important factor that has worked against the increase of
students in the East European field has been the nature of the
opportunities which are offered to students. Immediately after the
liberation of the Slavic countries, after World War I, there seemed to
be a chance that students who acquired some knowledge of Slavic could
put it to use in their ordinary vocations. Those opportunities for
employment abroad that loomed so large in the calculations of students
of Spanish proved to be conspicuously absent in view of Communist
actions.
The spurt that occurred after World War II came to an end when the Iron
Curtain descended over almost the entire Slavic world, at least so far
as the average student was concerned. Men who had received some
instruction while in the Armed Services were able to take advantage of
the GI Bill of Rights and continue their studies. Yet most very soon
found that unless they intended to become real specialists, they would
not have the opportunity to use their knowledge.
The colleges and universities needed more men in view of the widespread
conviction that Russian, especially, was a proper and necessary subject.
Yet the field was relatively limited and did not require many
generations of post-graduate students to adequately staff the
departments. The chief opportunity besides teaching was government
service and this absorbed the greatest number. But, for those who did
not care for government work the range of opportunities soon became
restricted.
Most of these men and women, who are today specializing actively, are
persons who have received fellowships of some kind or value from one or
another of the larger foundations (the Rockefeller, Carnegie Corporation
and the Ford Foundation). As in other branches of scholarship, and even
the sciences, or those humanistic subjects which almost insure teaching
positions, these fellowships and scholarships play a more important part
in the economic life of the graduate student than ever before and any
increase or decrease in them is reflected almost immediately in the
number of students. The result has been a steady but perceptible drop in
graduate students during the past years. This has not been a bad sign in
reality, even though it may superficially seem a lack of interest.
We can be very sure, the world and human nature being what it is, that
there will be no such reaction against foreign languages as there was
during and after World War I. There are already signs that the number of
students has dropped to the point where it will remain stationary, or
from which it will perhaps rise slightly, during the next years.
The study of Slavic and East European subjects has followed a very
definite pattern in the last ten years with its shifts of emphasis
reflecting the changes that have taken place in that part of the globe.
It has followed political and economic relationships of the United
States and we can be confident that it will continue to do so.
Thus, since the beginning of World War I, the picture of Slavic and East
European studies in the United States has changed markedly. The
prospects today are far brighter than they ever have been. The
foundations have been laid and it only remains to build a superstructure
to fit into American life and at the same time present a consistent and
coherent picture of what that American life, and Slavic studies, really
need. The first period of test is over. Now is the time to present
Slavic scholarship to the American public and the scholarly world in
such a form that it can be assimilated and incorporated in the
intellectual life of the nation, and at the same time take account of
the possibilities offered by the large section of the population with
Slavic traditions.
CHAPTER 8
THE FUTURE TASKS OF SLAVIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
It is obviously impossible, under present conditions in America, even to
dream of offering any outline for a definite organization of studies of
that large area east of Scandinavia, Germany and Italy. We are dealing
with several linguistic and cultural entities which historically have
been subjected to widely differing influences. Especially in the field
of history and of culture in general, the old notion that a boundary
could be drawn between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, or
between the Christian and the Islamic Worlds, is definitely antiquated.
It was non-existent during the earlier periods of history although it
was partially valid for a few centuries. Even at the height of religious
separation, the Slavic World was itself divided, the Western Slavs and
some Southern Slavs on one side and the Eastern and most Southern Slavs
on the other. Today, with the general movements that are sweeping both
Europe and Asia, these lines are obliterated.
We are forced, thus, to recognize a far more complicated situation than
seemed possible even a few decades ago when the early students of Slavic
blindly, though sincerely, followed either the German or the Russian
cultural views of the area.
Studies in the United States in these fields must find, despite the many
obstacles, a new path, acquire a new breadth of vision, and work out a
new outline wherever the old has been shown to be deficient. This can
only be done by cooperation among both scholars and institutions. Though
the leading colleges and universities have found during the past century
their own methods for departmentalizing their courses and faculty, there
is hardly one which cannot adapt its resources to contribute to the
common cause. We will therefore content ourselves with sketching briefly
some of the problems, and their possible solutions, in the field of
organization.
_I. Integration in American Consciousness_
At the present time, educated Americans seem to find it impossible to
integrate the concepts that have been forced upon them by events since
1914. The older generation, and too large a part of the younger, view
the expanded practical concern for Eastern Europe and Asia as a serious
and troublesome addition to the range of knowledge which it is compelled
to acquire. This attitude has been fostered by the way in which the
expansion has occurred. Under the pressure of World War II, and its
accompanying developments, the government and the foundations alike have
been spending money to train men in present-day problems and have looked
askance at what we may call basic work in the evolution of the
situation.
Let us glance at this for a moment. Courses in ancient history, chiefly
of Greece and Rome, are an established part of all college and
university curricula and are even found in many high schools. Yet
invariably, these courses fail to discuss Greece and Greek culture after
the rise of Philip of Macedon and the Roman conquest of Greece. Studies
of the Roman Empire rarely extend beyond the reigns of Diocletian and
Constantine, where they are lost in vagueness about the Dark Ages and
the barbarian migrations. Even in the earlier period, almost no
attention has been given to vestiges of Greek and Roman culture outside
of Greece, Asia Minor and the Roman possessions in the West.
Thus, there is a cloudy realization that the Code of Roman Law was
finally drawn up in Constantinople, but the historical significance of
the past is not keenly appreciated. At the same time, anything that can
be labeled Byzantine is either treated separately or not considered at
all. There is even no realization that the Scandinavian Vikings extended
their activities to the East as well as to the West and such striking
evidence of this as the marriage of the daughter of Harold the Saxon,
the last Saxon King of England, to Volodymyr Monomakh of Kiev, seems an
incredible and isolated event. The scholars at Dumbarton Oaks and the
Mediaeval Academy of America are indeed doing work on Byzantine history,
culture and institutions but the other scholars working on the
foundations and development of the modern Western World have not
attempted to take their work into account, and are still limiting the
modern Western World to the British Isles, France, Germany, the Holy
Roman Empire and its descendants, ignoring the contacts of that world
with Byzantium in the early and later Middle Ages.
With a similar lack of understanding, the average student, though aware
of the fight between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes, rarely knows
that the Empire was then pushing into Slavic territory or that Saints
Cyril and Methodius, the Apostles to the Slavs, were in Rome as well as
Constantinople.
There is a scattered appreciation of such events as the Latin seizure,
and the Turkish capture, of Constantinople but only for their impact
upon the life of the West. The arrival in Western Europe of scholars
from Constantinople is taught as a great influence in the Renaissance
but no attention is paid to their origin or where they had studied.
The situation is even worse for later periods. There has been an almost
complete neglect not only of the history of the Balkan Slavs but of the
Greeks as well. For years after the establishment of the Gennadeion in
Athens, one of the few still unplundered collections of Greek and Slavic
manuscripts, Slavic scholars were as unaware of the existence of this
collection as the classical scholars were unaware of its importance.
One result of this traditional lack of understanding of early Eastern
history has been the tendency of American scholars to accept without
hesitation either the German view of Eastern Europe as a relatively
primitive region, or the Russian view that in some way everything in the
East was Russian and that it was only natural that Catherine II of
Russia should dream of becoming the Empress of the Byzantine Empire with
her capital still at St. Petersburg.
Thus all the peoples of Eastern Europe disappear from European history
shortly after the time of Constantine and do not reappear until the
foundation of St. Petersburg and the development of the Eastern Question
in the late eighteenth century. Even the national struggles in Vienna
during the reign of Francis Joseph II are not evaluated, and far too
many would-be-students of Eastern Europe are still under the impression
that movements for national independence during World War I and the
Russian Revolution arose out of thin air.
The complicated events of the last decades pre-empt the concentration of
students and give them little time to grasp the background which
underlay the past and gave rise to the complexities of the present.
It would be presumptuous to expect adequate and detailed knowledge of
Eastern history to be added to the intellectual burden of all students,
even though it would be desirable. The most that can be hoped is that
students and scholars interested in this field will be able eventually
to focus more attention, in the general curricula, on a few of the major
trends that worked openly and secretly in Eastern history for over a
thousand years, culminating in the present situation.
The last years have seen a few attempts, like those of the late Dr.
Bilmanis, Minister of Latvia in Washington, to prepare a history of
Latvia. We now have histories of Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and
two or three of Ukraine. But there is still lacking a general survey
presenting in readable, popular and general form the outstanding
developments in the Slavic area. The development of such a synthesis of
the East European culture, in a form that could be included with the
more detailed studies of the Western countries, would go far in
overcoming the vague and unrealistic ideas which are fostered either by
ignorance or by the propagandistic works of the formerly dominating
nations.
When we remember that it was nearly the end of the seventeenth century
before Eastern Europe acquired the form that it had on the eve of World
War I and that this order was seriously challenged throughout the
nineteenth century, we can see the necessity of a complete revision of
many of the established and traditional concepts. Such a need must be
recognized by the educational leaders as a whole, for Eastern Europe has
greatly and consistently influenced the West. No greater step forward
can be taken than to emphasize this historical fact and to show the
important role of Eastern Europe, both positively and negatively, in
shaping the world as we knew it at the beginning of the twentieth
century.
_II. The Divisions of the Area_
Awakening the American intellectual world to the need for reassessing
its concept of Eastern Europe is, of course, an essential problem for
Slavic students, but it can be fully accomplished only in cooperation
with those individuals and institutions concerned with the general
outline of human history. Far more than a mere multiplication of
courses, of lectures and of journals is needed. Yet if we assume that
steps are being taken toward this end, there still remains the very
pertinent question of what divisions and subdivisions of the area are to
be used in any detailed study. It is at this moment that we come face to
face with the tremendous historical and linguistic complications.
First considering linguistics, Slavic easily can be placed at the
center, for the greater number of the inhabitants of Eastern Europe
speak one of the Slavic tongues. The traditional point of view, which is
now being challenged by linguists, is to divide the Slavs into Western
(Czech, Slovak, Polish and Lusatian), Southern (Serb, Croatian, Slovene
and Bulgarian) and Eastern (Great Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian),
and to emphasize common linguistic aspects.
This is of advantage from the strictly philological point of view; it is
less valid when considering culture and history and the influence
exerted throughout the last millenium by the neighboring states and
cultures. As has been noted already, the constantly shifting line
between Eastern and Western churches cuts directly across the Slavic
world. On one side are the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles and Croatians, all of
whom have been primarily under Western influence. On the other are the
rest of the southern and eastern Slavs who have drawn their original
inspiration from Byzantium and have then undergone, in varying degrees,
cultural influence from the Latin and Germanic west, the Scandinavian
north, the Mongol and Tatar east and the Turkish south. Ukraine, and to
a lesser degree Byelorussia (Whiteruthenia), have felt a consistently
strong Western influence throughout their history. Western influence
among the Serbs has been more spasmodic, while Russia (Moscow) remained
relatively free from such influences almost until the time of Peter I.
Furthermore, the area also includes the Uralic-Altaic peoples, the
Finns, Estonians, Hungarians, Turks and many less developed peoples.
These can hardly all be treated as offshoots of Slavic. The Uralic
peoples, especially those who are most highly developed, have shared the
influences of the Slavs, and have been closely connected with Western
Europe. The Finns and Estonians have had strong Scandinavian contacts
and the Hungarians have been closely associated with the Empire, the
Poles and the Czechs. The Altaic peoples, largely Mohammedan, have
become an inherent part of Islamic culture and yet, despite their
distinct linguistic and cultural heritage, their fate has been closely
linked with that of the Slavs. In addition, there are the modern Greeks,
direct heirs of the Byzantine tradition with their own sharply defined
culture; the Romanians, who are proud of their Latin traditions; and the
Albanians, who form a distinct Indo-European linguistic group crowded
between the Southern Slavs and the Greeks. Neither can there be excluded
such peoples of the Caucasus as the Georgians, the Armenians and the
Azerbaijanians, nor other Christian and Mohammedan peoples formerly
included in the Russian Empire.
The time is long past when all of these national groups can be studied
only in terms of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Their history and
their struggles for liberation create many cultural subsections which
cut across linguistic boundaries and, in part, natural geographical
subdivisions. It is difficult to name satisfactorily these cultural
subsections, for they vary in the different periods of history. Yet, the
definition of courses of detailed study or area programs, which have
become so popular at the present time, demands it.
There is another difficulty which arises. The events of World War II and
the creeping Soviet imperialism have succeeded in dominating all of the
states which were established, or attempted after World War I. In the
western extension of the Iron Curtain, only Finland in the north and
Greece and Turkey in the south have succeeded in maintaining a
precarious independence. As a result, all of the programs of instruction
that have been arbitrarily set up exclude these three countries.
Whatever value such a division may have at present, it is certainly no
guide to the past, for at times Finland was under Swedish rule, which
extended south of the Gulf of Finland. Likewise, for centuries Greece,
the Southern Slavs and Romania (then divided between Wallachia, Moldavia
and Transylvania), together with Ukraine, formed another definite
cultural block, which to a large degree shared the same political fate.
For many years, the nations of the Balkan Peninsula were treated as a
Balkan block and, because of the ways these states secured their
political independence, they shared years of stormy political life. The
term “Balkans” was then, with considerable contempt, applied to Greece,
Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Romania. Yet after World War
I, when the Adriatic littoral was added to Serbia and Montenegro to form
Yugoslavia and Romania recovered Transylvania and Bessarabia, the name
came to have little meaning. Now with Turkey playing a positive role,
efforts have been made to use the name Southeastern Europe, but with
little success. “Danubian Europe” is worse, for the Danube crosses both
Austria and Hungary, and avoids Greece and Albania.
At the present time, the term “Eastern Europe” is probably the least
objectionable but it is ridiculous to apply this term to Czechoslovakia
and Hungary which are almost in the heart of Europe. Still, this is the
term, added to Slavic or Slavonic, used as a general title by both the
British _Slavonic and East European Review_ and _The American Slavic and
East European Review_. But the culture area also includes all of the
former Russian possessions in Asia, for the Urals owe their position as
the boundary of Europe more to the fact that they run roughly north and
south at the eastern end of the Caspian Sea, and so are useful to
cartographers, than to any historical importance.
The term “Mid-Europe” has been introduced lately to cover the history of
that strip of countries which won their independence after World War I
and lost it after World War II. It is an attempt to unify the
non-unifiable, except in terms of their present fate, for during much of
the last thousand years the fate of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary
has been intertwined, but Poland has been involved with Lithuania,
Byelorussia (White Ruthenia), and Ukraine, while the main relations of
Latvia and Estonia have been with the Scandinavian and other Baltic
peoples.
For purposes of detailed study then, a division can be made between the
eastern Baltic shore in the north, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in
the center, and the states of the Balkan Peninsula, including Turkey, in
the south.
What then can we do with Ukraine and Byelorussia, two of the three East
Slavic states? For both countries connections with Moscow have been of a
special character with a long record of turbulence, opposition and
attempts at independence. They have lived their own lives with
intermittent contact with the West; in fact, it was through them that
most of the purely Western influences drifted into Moscow and the land
of the Great Russians, which in ancient times was more closely connected
through the Volga River with the Caucasian group of peoples and the
Golden Horde.
Attempts to divide the entire area into regional sections with common
problems and cultural development produces only confusion, for such
divisions are applicable only to short periods in the ever-changing
kaleidoscope of history. The realization of this fact presents one of
the greatest obstacles to the student of present problems. The idea,
fostered in Prague, that the key to all East European problems could be
the assumption of a single Slavic history and Slavic culture can be
easily proved to be as vain as Pan-Germanism, Pan-Turanianism, and
Pan-Asianism.
Yet, today this over-simplification has been twisted by the Russian
Messianic concept into a formidable weapon against the rest of the
world. The Communist theories, like the old Tsarist theories of Moscow
as the Third Rome, cannot be laughed away. They must be met by accurate
and careful study and this does necessitate some sort of recognizable
division. But, the solution to these contradictions cannot be found in
either the Russian or the old Germanic theories; it demands the most
serious consideration from the modern scholars of the entire world
outside the Iron Curtain.
_III. Undergraduate Courses_
Considering the material that can be reasonably included in the
curriculum of the average American college, we must severely limit our
expectations. Because the average college aims to give a well rounded
education in many fields of knowledge, the number of persons
specializing in Slavic and East European subjects will be very limited.
The amount of time that the average student can spend on these subjects
and the amount of effort that the average institution will expend to
make them effective, is limited. Furthermore, there will be few
colleges, not connected with universities, either inclined to embark
upon an ambitious program, or supplied with the resources to undertake
it. But, this does not mean that nothing is to be done or that it is to
be done carelessly.
Until that time when the main facts of the history of Eastern Europe and
of Eastern European and Slavic culture are included in the general
scheme of the development of the modern world or in courses in the
development of contemporary civilization, interested persons on the
faculty must work out a minimum program. This will vary according to the
general content, either in history or literature, and will fall into its
proper place in the general curriculum, whether or not a special
department is established. There are some things that can be expected
and we will divide these into four headings: history, literature,
culture and language. We will here consider the first three.
The prime requirement in all these subjects is scientific accuracy,
something which is far too often honored in the breach. There has been
in the past too great a tendency to accept some superficial treatment
composed of half truths. We must remember that ignorance, and conscious
ignorance at that, is often better than incorrect knowledge. The problem
lies not so much in what a person does not know as in what he knows
wrong.
At the present time, there scarcely can be given a course in modern
history which overlooks and omits the questions that have been forced
upon the attention of the world by Russian Communism. There is,
therefore, little or no reason why the main facts of the present
situation should not be correctly given with proper weight laid on the
Soviet structure and methods. This involves a clear recognition that
there are important differences not only between the old capitalistic
and the new communistic Russia, but also that there is an ostensible
stress which the Soviet Union lays upon the differences between the
populations inhabiting her republics, subject as they all are to the
same Russianization. There can be no excuse for the oft repeated view
that all the people of the Soviet Union are Russians in the old sense of
the word. There is no reason for the arbitrary omission of the
nationality problem on the ground that it has no validity in fact or
experience just because it was denied by the Tsars a century ago. There
have been too many instances of even responsible publications omitting
from accurate surveys references to such problems, at the will of
certain anti-Communist nationalist Russian groups. Although there is
available today adequate and easily accessible literature, far too
little of it has penetrated the scholarly world which is still burdened
with the traditions of the past.
The same can be said of literature. For many years masterpieces of
Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gorky have been included in courses
on modern European literature. Still, far too often, they have been
presented in a vacuum, without any attempt to equate them with Russian
life and thought. This is perhaps less common today, but immediately
after World War I, it is not extreme to say, there was a Western science
of Russian literature almost as far from reality as that first French
translation of _Anna Karenina_ which, in the interest of clarity, calmly
omitted the entire Levin-Kitty story.
On the other hand, with the number of available translations of nearly
all the prominent Russian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, there is no reason why courses on Russian literature in
translation should not be offered. The material can be easily gathered
to give an adequate picture of the development of the literature for the
non-specialist. Whether this is done as part of a general course, or as
a special course, will depend upon the program of the institution but it
will benefit not only the general student but also the person who is
endeavoring to learn the language.
The problem is more complicated for the other East European languages.
Perhaps Polish literature is the only one that has been translated with
even near minimal adequacy. Still, there are a number of translations
from the Czech, especially from Karel Capek, the popular dramatist who
was active before World War II. There are some good Ukrainian
translations, especially of poetry done by the late Percival Cundy and
the selections already in English give a fair representation of all the
major Ukrainian authors. The literatures of the other Slavic groups are
still poorly represented in translations.
There is a real need therefore for the preparation of a series of
anthologies in translation, not only from the Slavic languages, but also
from the other literatures of East Europe. There may be difficulties in
securing publication of such works, and hesitation in introducing them
with success into the various courses, but there is no reason why any
college library should not work to build a collection of such works,
even if it is not interested in expanding its study in this field.
Where there are courses in one or more of the languages of the area, it
will be, of course, easy to prepare courses on the literature with
readings in the original. Yet, these can never replace the full need for
courses in translation or courses in which the originals are
supplemented by translations.
The same applies to courses in the fine arts, especially music and
painting, both of which have flourished in Slavic lands. There are
special difficulties here that are not present in the literature, for in
the past, and especially the nineteenth century, most of the Slavic
artists appeared in the Western World as either Russian, Austrian or
Italian. As such, their contributions have been hidden even beyond their
own desires, for in 1918 the world discovered that many artists, who had
been invited as representatives of the dominating empires, rebelled and
proudly declared themselves Poles or Czechs, much to the surprise of
their audiences.
We can be sadly confident that it will be some time before undergraduate
courses in East European history and culture will everywhere acquire a
proper direction and clear acceptance. But year by year, as these
studies expand in the colleges, an increasing number of students are
affected and Slavic studies are coming closer and closer to the academic
level and seriousness of the older disciplines. This offers hope for the
future and, while we cannot expect a Slavic department to become one of
the numerically larger departments, it can rise to its opportunities and
exercise its functions both in training specialists and in broadening
the knowledge of a larger and larger number of students. The lag in
Slavic studies is diminishing with each year and it will soon vanish
entirely if developments of the present day are carefully regarded.
_IV. Language Instruction_
The first task of a Slavic or East European language department is of
course to teach the language. It should be taken for granted that any
person who claims to be a specialist in the history and culture of any
country should be able to read, write, speak and understand its
language. The language courses in any department are intended to satisfy
these requirements. This however is a goal and the merest contact with
even good students will show how far it is from being fully realized.
Yet it must be the goal even though we accept something far short of it
as that which can be reasonably attained.
There is no easy way to learn a foreign language and to maintain fluency
in it. And fluency can be best secured by a constant use of the
language, hardly possible in the United States despite the aspiration of
the student. Somewhere, somehow there must be a compromise.
There are, of course, scattered individuals like the late Professor John
Dyneley Prince, who seemed to have a special gift for speaking foreign
tongues. As a matter of fact, Prince built his entire scholarly and
political career on this inborn gift. His knowledge of spoken tongues
was fantastic, but it should be recognized that he maintained it only by
a constant preoccupation with language. The time that others spent on
bridge and other hobbies, he dedicated to reading dictionaries and
annotating grammars. He continued, so long as his health allowed, the
labor which made it possible for him to perform his almost incredible
feats. Men like Prince are exceptional, but they emphasize the fact that
there is no single road to success. Every individual learns languages in
his own way and hence there can easily be a wide divergence of
educational methods recommended.
There was a time when instruction in modern languages followed the
methods used in studying Greek and Latin, with an excessive emphasis on
knowledge of grammar and a corresponding neglect both of the finer
points of usage and the ability to read fluently. The old joke that the
object of learning the classical languages was to be able to distinguish
the different uses of the genitive case was true only when scholars
ceased using Latin as a medium of communication. While this was a
passing phase, it left its mark on the study of modern languages. The
Slavic languages, from their inception as subjects of university study,
have been subject to this temptation. But even before the application of
so-called modern methods, there was a larger proportion of serious
students able to express themselves satisfactorily in the Slavic
languages than there was in the more common tongues, such as French and
German.
On the other hand, the great increase of interest in Slavic languages
came during World War II and this left its imprint on the methods of
instruction. For military and governmental purposes, speaking knowledge
was very important and became even more so when the schools were charged
with training men for intelligence work. The emphasis on a speaking
knowledge of Slavic languages was important in World War II because the
number of young Americans who knew these languages well was seriously
declining. Thirty years before, there were many young Slavs who had but
recently migrated to the United States or were the children of parents
who spoke their native languages fluently though grammatically
incorrectly. The children of these people, trained in American schools,
have lost most of their facility in their fathers’ tongues and need
fundamental training.
At the same time the slow but persistent strengthening of the Iron
Curtain and the refusal of the Soviet government to allow free
emigration of its citizens has reduced the number of young instructors
available. The majority of competent instructors in America have lived
in this country since the close of World War I and many of them are
unfamiliar with the latest turns of the language as used in the Soviet
Union.
The difficulty of obtaining instructors is counterbalanced by the great
improvement in methods of recording and reproducing sounds. It is now
possible in almost all institutions to give students accurate and well
rendered records and tapes of the leading Russian dramas and speeches as
recorded and broadcast by the Soviet authorities themselves. It is also
possible for the students to record their own pronunciation and compare
it with the accepted standards. The use of these modern scientific and
technical aids is undoubtedly improving pronunciation, though it is by
no means certain that it is equally satisfactory in teaching fluency
when the student is called upon to express his own thoughts.
At the same time, the new interest in language often overlooks the fact
that students may desire to learn a Slavic language for widely differing
purposes. In this respect he does not differ from the average English
speaking person who may fully master the language and still be almost
completely ignorant of the technical terms (jargon) of some particular
profession or activity. Disregarding the notion that a foreign language
should be learned only to read _belles-lettres_, we far too often
replace it with the ability to carry on ordinary conversations on
general subjects. There is of course, in all languages, an irreducible
minimum of words of universal applicability, but methods must be found
to include special vocabularies for students with special interests.
This has been met in part by the production of technical dictionaries
for the several sciences but much work remains to be done.
These remarks apply to all the languages of East Europe. However, modern
methods have received their fullest application in teaching Russian,
although auspicious beginnings have been made for others, especially
Polish. It is highly desirable that textbooks and other aids be
increased in the near future to provide all Slavic languages with
adequate materials, adapted to the use of English-speaking students.
Russian is still the language in which most American students are
interested. In a way this is natural because Russian, both by its
political importance, the number of persons speaking it and the
reputation of some Russian writers, is undoubtedly the most important.
Other Slavic and East European tongues are adequately taught only in
some of the larger universities or in smaller institutions with special
interests, be it circumstances of the administration or the character of
the student body. Yet it is hardly true that any person interested in
the broader studies of Eastern Europe can be adequately equipped if he
possesses only a knowledge of Russian, though this does not make the
situation as hopeless as it might seem.
There are so many common roots and forms of expression in all Slavic
languages that it is possible to prepare a course which will emphasize
the salient features of each language, equip the student with a
knowledge of any one Slavic language, and still enable him to handle,
for scientific purposes, the others without too much difficulty. This
was successfully done by Professor Prince at Columbia when, with a fine
disregard for special grammatical features of the different languages,
he arranged a general reading course in the Slavic tongues. For some
years, Professor Manning followed his example. The course was finally
dropped because of other departmental needs but there is no reason why
such a course could not be standardized and made available in many
institutions which are unable to afford a complete university staff to
teach the different languages individually.
The greatest obstacle to the study of Slavic languages is the fact that,
until very recently, few students reached the graduate level with an
adequate background in the languages. This has been somewhat relieved by
the introduction of Russian and other Slavic languages in the colleges,
but often language instruction could be advantageously introduced in
high schools. Furthermore, there are many institutions, largely
supported by churches or societies, which give instruction for which
colleges should be willing to give appropriate credit.
Such credit could be granted by a rigid insistence upon accomplishment
coupled with a liberal reading of the requirements for college entrance.
Thus, despite the lesser emphasis paid to definite entrance
examinations, it should be possible for educational institutions and
state organizations to arrange examinations in East European languages
even where they were not learned in a recognized school. In many
instances the efficiency of summer courses, such as those given by the
Ukrainian National Association under the supervision of the Ukrainian
Free University, could be checked by some central body. If instruction
were satisfactory, credits could be accepted _in toto_, or the graduates
could be given the opportunity of an individual examination in order to
receive credit. It would seem that almost all major churches and
societies in the United States interested in the study of a foreign
language would react favorably if there were any assurance that students
in their courses would receive proper recognition.
The American educational system is neglecting, at present, those
resources for study of East European and Slavic languages which already
exist. While it is true that formerly instruction was often given by
ill-prepared and incompetent teachers, the arrival in this country of
large numbers of educated DP’s, often with teaching experience in their
own lands, has changed the situation, and made it possible to build up a
large cadre of language students, prepared to undertake more advanced
work at an earlier stage.
In the language field as nowhere else, we can clearly see marked
improvement in the past thirty years. There are better textbooks and
better instructors. If there is a negative aspect, it is in an excessive
emphasis on what is conceived to be a modern system of study, which
rests too much upon adherence to hypothetical rules regarding how a
language should be learned, and a tendency to look askance at any
exceptions to this, regardless of what results may have been attained.
There is still much more to be done before the knowledge of these
languages is sufficiently spread throughout the intellectual and
research organs of the country.
_V. Graduate Work_
Considering the problems of graduate study in American universities, we
must not overlook the fact that Slavic studies in Europe developed
entirely under the methods and system of German scholarship. Although
this may seem surprising, it was at Vienna, Leipzig, and Berlin that the
outlines of the modern sciences were laid. The early universities at St.
Petersburg and Moscow were largely staffed by Germans and the oldest
university in Slavic lands, the Charles University of Prague, lost its
Czech character during the Thirty Years War. A Czech section of the
university was begun as an adjunct only in the 1880’s and did not
recover its original insignia until after the liberation of
Czechoslovakia. Hence, the German system of scholarship was considered
basic, even though it was greatly altered by later development of Slavic
studies at the universities of Prague and Krakow. The influence of
Prague and Krakow was natural, for it was in Slavic universities in
Slavic lands that Slavic would become the cornerstone of humanistic
teaching, acquiring a position similar to that of English and American
literature and history in American institutions. We can never hope to
equal or surpass the work in these institutions though we can admit it
without any sense of failure.
Since American graduate schools have been based on German models, they
inherited the German division of faculty with history and its allied
subjects separated from literature and philology. Nor have these
divisions been changed noticeably by grouping various chairs in allied
subjects into departments. While there have been attempts, as at
Harvard, to bring together in the Slavic pattern, all courses dealing
with Slavic subjects, this practice has not been generally followed. The
result is that history and literature have been taught separately and
have been combined only in part in more recent Russian and Slavic
institutes.
In both general fields, the usual methods and regulations can be applied
easily and completely; hence, the introduction of Slavic and East
European into the general curriculum has not caused difficulties. There
remains only this question: should there be some provision for normally
including one or more general courses from either section in the
curriculum of the other to augment the background of those students
tempted to specialize too closely, who might thus fail to see the
general cultural problems which any literature or history presents.
There are, however, certain limitations which the student will
encounter, due largely at the present time to the rule in the free world
which prohibits a free exchange of students between countries. A student
desiring to work in English, French and German history can go freely to
the appropriate intellectual center to consult sources; a relatively
large number of students in these fields have studied at the
universities and archives of the country in which they were interested.
This was also true to a certain degree, between the wars, in the
so-called succession states when every year students went to the
universities of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, the
Baltic and Greece. Today this is impossible and the administration of
students’ programs must take this fact into account. The limitation
severely restricts research in certain slightly explored areas such as
the remains of Slavic literature from the Middle Ages, the unpublished
memoirs and manuscripts of many modern writers, and memorabilia from
many periods of historical and economic importance.
These limitations can be partly overcome by increased research in the
archives of many of the countries still free. There is doubtless much
material in the libraries of Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries,
Greece and Turkey which has never been adequately studied by a Slavic
expert.
Limitations exist to an even greater degree in archaeology and
ethnology, since research before World War I was still in its infancy
and subsequent discoveries have been filtered through the exigencies of
Russian Communist propaganda. This imposes upon the student the
necessity for a most thorough and careful analysis of all Soviet
references and newly published material, often edited to suit the policy
of the moment, for it often involves a direct contradiction to what the
Soviets declared to be true in the period between the two World Wars.
This is the situation not only in history, but also in the literature of
the past and present. The theses issued by the Communist Party for the
three hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654–1954),
after the death of Stalin and under the “new” Soviet policy, stand in
sharp contrast to the published statements of Soviet scholarship during
the 1920’s and 1930’s. Similarly, the rewriting of the biographies,
during the relatively unhampered conditions of the early 1920’s, of such
authors as Dostoyevsky, Shevchenko, Franko, Mickiewicz and many others,
makes it impossible to accept uncritically either the older Soviet
accounts or even much of the material published under the Tsarist
regime.
There is then imposed upon faculty and students, the need to recognize
that Slavic studies cannot merely accept the latest discoveries and
statements as a correction of the past, as in other fields, but must
include the most careful consideration of whether in the present or the
past they have been more grossly falsified. Reportedly new discoveries
in the humanistic and cultural fields may be only a dialectic exercise
of the organs of the Tsarist or Communist regimes in order to deceive
the outside world. For example, the declaration of the validity of
“socialist realism” meant a deliberate misinterpretation of the writings
of earlier Communist authors, which can be understood only in terms of
politics, not literature. Promulgated ideas were accepted only after the
publication of the official list of writings as decided by Communist
authorities. Similarly, the original philological theories of Marr soon
lost what validity they possessed when they were adopted by Marr’s
fellow-Georgian, Stalin, as the Soviet system and were imposed for
twenty-five years to serve Communist purposes. Even what remained valid
suffered when Marr, after his death, was officially discredited and his
original ideas went through a second period of wilful perversion. Such
instances could be multiplied by the hundreds, even including Sosyura’s
poem _Love Ukraine_, which was deemed worthy of a Stalin Prize only to
be condemned, a few years later, as anti-Communist and “bourgeois
nationalist.”
This constant shifting of Soviet truth has involved strange deviations
by even distinguished scholars who have tried to combine their sense of
scholarship and accuracy with their desire to be admitted to the Soviet
Union for further study. It has also increased the American public fear
of Communism and has aided the rise of the so-called “anti-Communist
hysteria” which has restrained men who, though not Communist themselves,
are unwilling to be accused by the Soviets of open hostility.
There is still another unsatisfied need in Slavic studies. The Western
World, since the seventeenth century, for good or ill, has relegated
religion, or the lack of it, to a subordinate place in modern history.
While recognition is given both religious and non-religious authors and
movements, nowhere have religious motives played the ultimate primary
role. The contrary is true in the East European area, where religion, or
opposition to it, plays the same role it did in medieval Europe. In
Russian literature of the nineteenth century both Leo Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky were absorbed in the world of the Orthodox Church and, in
their reaction to it, were leaders of the westernizing intelligentsia.
Neither’s influence can be understood without a consideration of the
ethos of Russian Orthodoxy, but this is rarely treated as a serious
subject, even though it furnishes the key to that Russian Messianistic
dream which so frequently emerges in the stream of Russian culture. In a
lesser degree, the same can be said of the more negative Messianism of
Mickiewicz and other Polish writers, of the goals of Shevchenko and,
above all, of the patriotic works of the Serb poet, Nyegosh. In
addition, there is the almost completely unknown world of the Russian
Old Believers, or Starovyery, who have left an imprint on many fields of
Russian culture. Although rarely mentioned, they are far better known in
the Russian revolutionary movement, particularly for their preservation
of old Russian icons.
Still another field for which material is available, is the history of
the Slavs and Slavic culture in the Western World. Professor Jaroslav
Rudnyckyj of the University of Manitoba has detailed changes of the
Ukrainian language in Canada, and H. L. Mencken has provided startling
information on Slavic languages in America, in his _The American
Language_, but the full extent of these changes and the effect of
American life on Slavic folklore and folk art, as well as the history of
the settlements, has not yet been fully studied. At present, because of
support given by foundations and the government, stress is laid upon
present Slavic conditions and culture. This is only natural, but the
present, and indeed the future, can only be understood by the past.
There is much historical study to be done with the resources that the
United States and Western Europe can furnish. Slavic history has been so
consistently neglected, or studied in such narrow contexts, that its
general lines of contact with the West and Asia have not yet been
established with any degree of certainty, even in the Slavic countries.
If interest has been shown in the relations between Kiev and the
Scandinavians, it has not been extended to the contacts with Byzantium
during all ages. Nor have scholars examined the Swedish-Polish relations
from the viewpoint of both countries. The interplay of the Balkan Slavs
with both Italy and the Ottomans is still veiled in darkness.
All these subjects can be studied by Slavic scholars in America without
limiting the study to an assumed narrow sphere which has, too often,
been the fate of studies both in Europe and the Slavic lands. The
viewpoint of American students, therefore, with a broader perspective
may result in a new school of Slavic studies, oriented by an impartial
attitude to either the Russian imperialistic claims or the German desire
to treat Eastern Europe, in the broader sense, as a subordinate arena in
the world’s history. These traditional viewpoints are today being
outmoded rapidly by current history; therefore, the sooner American
Slavic and East European scholarship realizes its own possibilities and
its subject matter, the more valuable will be its contribution to the
welfare of the United States and the world.
_VI. Area Studies_
The development of area studies, which first attracted wide attention
during World War II, fills a certain gap in the general organization of
Slavic and East European studies. They compensate for a deficiency in
the education and application of students but they can never fully
replace the work of the graduate school. Area studies are at their best
when they train young men and women in a knowledge of regions relatively
unknown to the general public, which for one reason or another are so
inaccessible that few, if any, of the students will have an opportunity
to visit them in the course of their studies. They can then be regarded
in two quite different ways, for they are either a desirable prelude to
more serious work or they are vocational schools of the highest class.
In either respect, they will prove their value if properly handled.
To understand the place of area studies, it must be recognized that the
American university system has sharply differentiated between the
cultural linguistic phases and historical and economic aspects of any
given section of the world. Both areas of understanding require a
knowledge of the general geography, the outstanding products of the
region, its population and characteristics. It has been far too easy, in
the past, for students of Slavic, as well as other cultures, to secure a
knowledge of the literature of a period without an adequate realization
of the background against which that literature was produced. To cite an
example from Russian literature, during the first half of the nineteenth
century, very few Russian writers ever visited Kiev and apart from the
visit of Pushkin to the south of Russia and the service of Lermontov and
Leo Tolstoy in the Caucasus, there are few works which picture anything
but St. Petersburg, Moscow and a small area south of Moscow. While the
average student does not expect such a limitation of subject matter, it
is at once obvious from the most superficial knowledge of the expanse of
Russia. We could parallel this case with any number of others.
From this point of view, area studies represent but a slight increase of
detailed knowledge over that which the average student acquires before
he begins specialization in any linguistic or historical field. This
knowledge must be supplemented by detailed studies in one of the
accepted fields of learning if the student is not to remain a talented
amateur.
But there is another aspect of area studies which has given them their
vogue at the present time. The global complexion of World War II brought
home to the American government, all far-sighted educators and even to
members of the general public, the tremendous ignorance which existed in
the United States concerning all parts of the world except some sections
of Western Europe. It was urgently necessary to prepare, in the minimum
time, relatively large numbers of individuals to serve throughout the
world. The involvement of the Soviet Union and the Nazi overrunning of
the states to its west further emphasized this need. Area studies were
the result.
These studies were definitely geared to educate men and women who could
be quickly called in case of need. That need still exists and
undoubtedly a large percentage of the students who enter such
concentrated programs hope to put their knowledge to practical use, for
the most part, outside the universities. There is still a great demand
for area courses and if ever the Iron Curtain were lifted and free
commercial relations reestablished, we would speedily find that even
with all these courses, the demand would outstrip the supply.
But, it seems likely that area studies will diminish in popularity if
Slavic and other East European studies find their rightful place in the
undergraduate curriculum and provide students with a real appreciation
of the significance and general culture of the area. If that were so,
they might continue with still greater detail, for an area study
including the entire Soviet Union and the satellites becomes almost a
contradiction in terms. It would be the same as if a student selected
North and South America for a single area study. It becomes very little
more than a brief survey of conditions in some particular field. This
danger has appeared already in places where area studies have been given
on the Slavic lands and have tended to become mere adjuncts of certain
phases of Russian and Communist politics and thought.
Taken in the true sense, these courses have amply fulfilled the purpose
for which they were intended. They have served to focus attention on
many neglected problems. More than this, they have served to round out
the point of view of many students, but their unfortunate preoccupation
with the present has also created _lacunae_ which can only be filled by
other means. Area studies, in their present sense and scope, are a
welcome sign of progress but they are not an adequately developed source
of our knowledge of Slavic and East European subjects. They are a step
in the right direction, have contributed much to overcome the almost
complete ignorance with which our country entered World War II, but they
fall short of the full needs.
_VII. Summary_
We have now reviewed the history of Slavic studies in the United States
indicating their scope, their limitations and their prospects. It
remains to summarize all this and, in terms of past experiences, to make
some tentative predictions of needs for the future.
The number of students of Slavic and East European subjects increased
many times during and after World War II, because public attention was
centered on this area. There are now signs which indicate that this
marked increase is coming to an end. For propaganda purposes, sometimes
deliberate and sometimes based upon ignorance, slackening interest is
attributed to the fear of being labeled a Communist. Yet there are
deeper reasons, for it is rare that the rush of American students into
any subject, whether a science or a humanistic study, lasts more than a
few years. One reason is, in many cases, purely materialistic. The
overwhelming majority of students who pursue higher studies do so for
purely professional reasons, either in government service, scholarship,
journalism or business. An added complication today is the fact that
most students expect to receive scholarships or fellowships during their
period of study, and these have been distributed liberally by the
Foundations, colleges and universities. Yet, at the very moment when the
number of students in Slavic studies show signs of diminishing, we are
also given an intensive barrage of propaganda on the need for increasing
the number of students in the natural sciences. There will be increased
future assistance for the sciences resulting in more available and far
better positions than in the Slavic and East European field.
We must remember, too, that because of the rapid development, most of
the key men in Slavic studies, no matter what their fields, are still
relatively young. Few are over fifty-five and, unless the mortality rate
experienced during World War II is repeated, we can only accept the fact
that the rate of promotion will be slow and attrition by retirement and
death will be at a low level. Prospects for advancement, then, are not
as good as they were even ten years ago although there will always be
openings for the well trained scholars.
A need will probably last longest in Eastern non-Russian languages for,
with the passing of time, the present lack of competent scholars in many
of these countries will be felt more and more. There will also be a lack
of those who have really studied the origins of the present situation,
the past history of these lands and even of the Russian people and are
familiar with those currents which have led to the development of the
present situation. We need, in other words, to study the Byzantine
relationships with the Slavs, the pre-eighteenth century German contacts
with the Slavs, the nineteenth century, and those more specialized
subjects such as archaeology, and ethnology, which are still ignored.
The second aspect closely connected to this, both in the present and
future, is the furnishing of an instructional staff. In some fields
there are still too few men now available and while the younger
generation is being trained, the United States is wasting the services
of many competent scholars who have arrived since World War II began,
who, because of their ignorance of English, are often compelled to take
menial and unintellectual positions. This is a tragic waste at a time
when so much half-knowledge is being disseminated. There must be more
contact between these newly arrived specialists and the general
educational system. Some of these men undoubtedly need special training
to equip them to function advantageously in the American system, but it
is sheer folly for the country and the universities alike to discount
them wholly, or to confine them to minor institutions maintained by
their own groups. American scholarly societies should make every effort
to bring into their membership the newly arrived scholars and to
cooperate with those institutions which have been recently transplanted
to America, such as the Shevchenko Scientific Society. By neglecting to
do so, American education is overlooking a large reservoir of trained
personnel with long experience and a wide range of knowledge and ideas.
Another pressing problem is the need for money, money for the payment of
faculties, for scholarships, for the expansion and establishment of
libraries and museums. The lack of financial resources in the past has
often been the greatest handicap, for before World War II contributions
for this type of work were few. While the Foundations have contributed
handsomely to make the present expansion possible, it is hardly to be
expected that they will continue indefinitely. Thus, even now the East
European Fund of the Ford Foundation seems to be in the process of
liquidation.
Similarly, with the pressure exerted on universities, we can scarcely
hope that they, already pressed for funds to conduct research in other
branches, will be able to provide the money needed for Slavic and East
European studies. At the present time, there is a movement on foot to
secure large grants, on a one-time or yearly basis, from many of the
larger corporations. The plans offer encouragement but there is always
the danger that funds will be diverted to those subjects which promise
the most direct advantage to the donors, and while this may set free
certain university funds, it may also serve to furnish those favored
departments something more than their regular share of the institutional
income.
On the other hand, many societies of the larger groups of Slavic and
East European peoples possess relatively large sums of money which can
be used for cultural purposes. Some of these societies have already
awakened to their responsibility and are doing praiseworthy work in
publishing materials in English, in supporting refugee scholars and in
maintaining cultural institutions. It can only be hoped that all of the
societies will consider carefully the opportunities that are offered for
aiding in the development of endowment funds and gifts for Slavic and
other study.
In connection with this, the universities have an obligation to keep an
open mind about these offers and not to judge them in terms of the
teaching accepted in Hohenzollern Germany, Hapsburg Austria-Hungary,
Romanov Russia and the Communist Soviet Union. This is not asking the
universities to alter their demands for objectivity, but it is asking
them to recognize that points of view which serve the political
aspirations of the old imperialists should not be maintained because of
their prestige alone, for they have been challenged in large part by
outstanding scholars since World War I. The epigoni of the old Russian
professors are by no means as sure of their ground as were their masters
and it is ridiculous to suggest that no new ideas have been developed by
a reworking of the old and new material. We may still be far from the
time when there will be professors in the history and culture of every
one of the Slavic and East European groups, in a single institution, but
scholarship has advanced beyond the simple view which lumps all the
nations of Eastern Europe into one or two convenient sections and
accepts the view of the dominant nation as absolute truth.
There is, in addition, a great need for the collection and preservation
of material on Slavic and Eastern Europe. At the time of World War I,
the American Relief Commission under instructions from its chief,
Herbert Hoover, collected enormous masses of material now preserved in
the Hoover War Library at Stanford University. Slavic groups, societies
and associations have brought together relatively large collections of
the most valuable material that has appeared during and after World War
II. Much of this material has been saved at tremendous risks, but is
still scattered in various repositories, not always under ideal
conditions. In addition, the libraries of American universities are
becoming so crowded that they often hesitate to accept copies of works
which may seem superfluous at first sight.
Thus, it would be highly desirable to form a new institution, sponsored
by interested universities and the scholarly societies of the new
immigration, to preserve in a convenient place, under modern library
conditions, all this material. Such a project, admittedly ambitious,
would require assistance from some foundation, the cooperation of all
the factions among the new immigration, as well as the American
institutions. Administered by a joint board, it could easily be made a
center which would soon be unrivalled in the world. Even ephemeral
material, such as newspapers and programs, which seem of little or no
intrinsic importance, should be preserved, for in a few years they will
be hotly bargained for by the greatest libraries. Why should this not
now be brought together and made available for duly qualified students?
Such a collection would soon prove to be more important than many
apparently more valuable sources.
In the same way, perhaps under the same roof, there could be a Slavic
museum not only for the major arts but also for articles of domestic
use. Early immigrants brought with them home-made utensils, weavings,
carpets, and dishes which now seem crude and are discarded. However,
their real value is suggested by the fact that the New York State
Historical Society has organized in Cooperstown an agricultural museum
to preserve similar articles made in the early United States. The
disappearance of the old way of life in Eastern Europe, evident even
before the Communist wave of devastation and the ravages of the War,
have given these articles, now in the United States a value far beyond
anything imagined a few years ago. Some organizations such as the Polish
Roman Catholic Union in Chicago, the Ukrainian Museums in Ontario,
California, Chicago and Cleveland, and other groups have made small
scale efforts to establish collections and libraries; some of them, such
as the Shevchenko Society library, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences
library and the Hungarian Feleky library, have not yet found proper
housing. There are many other small and scattered museums and
collections. The development of a project on a continental scale would
at once reveal the similarities and dissimilarities existing among the
Slavic and East European peoples.
No single institution can possibly hope to achieve all this or to cover
adequately the subjects included in a careful survey and study of
Eastern Europe. Some new form of cooperation must be devised, if the
burden is not to become overwhelming and thus be neglected. It cuts
sharply in some respects across some of the American educational
traditions but the establishments of atomic laboratories sponsored by
several institutions, such as the Brookhaven laboratory, shows that
cooperation is possible.
These, then, are but a few possibilities for future expansion of Slavic
studies. The Slavic and East European studies in the United States are
still in their infancy and American scholars, whether of Slavic or
non-Slavic origin, have an enormous opportunity to push forward to solve
many of the problems which have, until now, isolated the peoples of
Eastern Europe and have barred them from playing their proper role in
world affairs.
Bibliography
Aldrich, Col. H. S. “Aims and Techniques in Language Teaching Today.”
(abstract) _AATSEEL Bulletin_, V (March, 1948), pp. 60–1.
Andrews, A. I. “University Courses Given in the United States of
America on Slavic and other Eastern European History, Languages and
Literature.” Reprinted from _Slavonic Review_, 1936.
“Area Study Programs—The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” edited by
Royden Dangerfield. Institute of Government and Public Affairs,
University of Illinois, 1955.
Bennett, W. C. “Area Studies in American Universities.” (_SSRC_),
Washington, 1951.
Brozek, Joseph. “Slavic Studies in America. The Present Status.”
_Journal of Higher Education_, XIV (1943), pp. 293–7.
Coleman, A. P. “The Teaching of Russian in the U.S.” _Russian Review_,
IV (Autumn, 1944), pp. 83–8.
— “The Teaching of Area and Language Courses in the Field of
Slavic and East European Studies.” _American Slavic Review_, IV
(August, 1945), pp. 185–208.
— “American Area and Language Courses in Slavic and East European
Studies 1946–1947.” _American Slavic Review_, V (November, 1946)
pp. 162–92.
— “A Report on the Status of Russian and Other Slavic and East
European Languages in the Educational Institutions of the U.S.”
(_AATSEEL_) New York, 1948.
Coleman, M. M. “A Yale Man Studies Russian. James Gates Percival
(1795–1856) and Russian in New Haven a Century Ago.” _Russian
Review_, VIII (April, 1949), pp. 127–34.
Coolidge, A. C. “A Plea for the Study of the History of Northern
Europe.” _American Historical Review_, II (October, 1896), pp. 34–9.
Cross, S. H. “On Teaching Contemporary Russian Civilization.”
_Slavonic Review_, XXI [American Series III] (August, 1944), pp.
93–101.
— “Teaching College Russian,” _Slavonic Review_, XXII [American
Series III] (October, 1944), pp. 39–52.
Czubatyj, N. D. “The Meaning of ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’.” _Ukrainian
Quarterly_, I (September, 1945), pp. 351–64.
De Francis, John, _ed._ _Report on the Second Annual Round Table
Meeting on Linguistic and Language Teaching._ (Institute of
Languages and Linguistics, Georgetown University, Monograph Series,
No. 1, September, 1951) Washington, 1951.
_Dictionary of National Biography_, New York.
Dorosh, J. T. _The Study and Teaching of Slavic Languages_,
Washington: Library of Congress, 1949.
Fenton, W. N. _Area Studies in American Universities_, Washington:
American Council on Education, 1947.
Graves, Mortimer. “A Memorandum on Regional Studies.” _Journal of
Higher Education_, XVI (November, 1943), pp. 431–4.
— _A Neglected Facet of the National Security Problem._
Washington, 1950.
Halecki, O. “Imperialism in Slavic and East European History.”
_American Slavic Review_, XI (February, 1952), pp. 1–26.
Hall, R. B. _Area Studies: with Special Reference to Their
Implications for Research in the Social Sciences._ (SSRC Pamphlet
No. 6) New York, 1947.
Hall, R. A., Jr. “Progress and Reaction in Modern Language Teaching.”
_AAUP Bulletin_, XXXI (Summer, 1945), pp. 220–30.
Hasek, C. W. _The Slavonic Languages and Literatures in American
Colleges and Universities._ (Higher Education Circular No. 23)
Washington, 1920.
Heindel, R. H. _The Present Position of Foreign Area Studies in the
U.S._ (SSRC) New York, 1950.
Huntington, W. C. “The Russian Translation Project Three Years Later.”
_Russian Review_, VII (Spring, 1947), pp. 76–87.
Jacques, Agnes. “Why Students Study Russian.” _Modern Language
Journal_, XXXI (December, 1947), pp. 525–34.
Kerner, R. J. “Slavonic Studies in America.” _Slavonic Review_, III
(December, 1924), pp. 244–58.
— “Coordination of Slavic Studies Between the Fields of the
Humanities and Social Studies.” _AATSEEL Bulletin_, VII
(December, 1949), pp. 33–4.
— “Language Study and American Education.” _PMLA_, LXVIII
(September, 1953), pp. 100–16.
Manning, C. A. “The Slavonic Session of the Modern Language
Association of America.” _Slavonic Review_, IV (1926), pp. ix-x.
— “The Slavonic Group of the Modern Language Association of
America.” _Slavonic Review_, V (1927), p. vii.
— “Slavonic Studies in the United States.” _Modern Language
Journal_, XIII (1929), pp. 280–288.
— “Die slawische Wissenschaft in den Vereinigten Staaten.”
_Osteuropa_, V (1930), pp. 171–8.
— “Polish and the American Universities.” _Poland America_, XIII
(1932), pp. 489–91.
— “Modern Language Association of U.S.A. (Slavonic Group).”
_Slavonic Review_, XI (1933), p. 521.
— “Slavonic Studies in the United States.” _Modern Language
Journal_, XIX (March, 1935), pp. 425–32.
— “American Slavonic.” _American Speech_, XI (1936), pp. 370–1.
— “The University and East European Cultures.” _Columbia
University Quarterly_, XXXIII (1941), pp. 242–51.
Maslenikov, O. A. “Slavic Studies in America, 1939–1946.” _Slavonic
Review_, XXV (April, 1946), pp. 528–37.
Matthews, W. K. “The Language Pattern of the U.S.S.R.” _Slavonic
Review_, XXVI (April, 1946), pp. 427–51.
Mohrenschildt, D. von. “Russian Studies in the U.S.” _AATSEEL
Bulletin_, (March, 1953), pp. 46–7.
— “Russian Area Studies and Research since World War II.” _Russian
Review_, X (April, 1953), pp. 111–19.
Nagurney, M. J. “The Teaching of Ukrainian in the U.S.” _American
Slavic Review_, IV (December, 1945), pp. 186–94.
Noyes, G. R. “Slavic Languages at the University of California.”
_Slavonic Review_, XXII [American Series, III] (October, 1944), pp.
53–60.
Ornstein, Jacob. “A Romance Language Instructor Looks at the Slavic
Languages.” _Modern Language Journal_, XXXIII (March, 1949), pp.
185–92.
— “A Decade of Russian Teaching: Notes on Methodology and
Textbooks.” _Modern Language Journal_, XXXV (April, 1951), pp.
263–79.
— “Facilities and Activities of the Library of Congress in the
Slavic and East European Field.” _American Slavic Review_, XII
(December, 1953), pp. 549–54.
Parry, Albert. “Teaching Russian in our Schools.” _Tomorrow_, X
(December, 1950), pp. 31–5.
Pei, M. A. “A Rational Program for Teaching Languages in American High
Schools.” _American Slavic Review_, IV (August, 1945), pp. 138–41.
Posin, J.A. “Russian Studies in American Colleges.” _Russian Review_,
VII (Spring, 1948), pp. 62–75.
Riazanovsky, N. V. “Old Russia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe.”
_American Slavic Review_, XI (October, 1952), pp. 171–88.
Rose, W. J. _Cradle Days of Slavic Studies—Some Reflections._
(Slavistica No. 23) Winnipeg, 1955.
Rosenbaum, M. W. “Slavonic Studies in America.” _Journal of Higher
Education_, XVI (January, 1943), pp. 9–14.
Rosicky, Rose. _A History of the Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska._
Omaha, 1929.
— “Russian Studies at Michigan, 1908–1943.” _AATSEEL Bulletin_, V
(June, 1948), p. 85.
Schmidt, G. P. “Colleges in Ferment.” _American Historical Review_,
LIX (October, 1953), pp. 19–42.
Senn, A. “College Russian: Objectives and Methods.” _American Slavic
Review_, V (May, 1946), pp. 176–86.
— “Obstacles in the Way of Slavic Studies.” _AATSEEL Bulletin_, VI
(March, 1949), pp. 59–62.
Smal-Stocki, R. _The Nationality Problem of the Soviet Union and the
Russian Communist Imperialism._ Milwaukee, 1952.
Spector, Ivan. “Russian Studies in the Pacific Northwest.” _Slavonic
Review_ XXII [American Series, III] (October, 1944), pp. 61–9.
Steward, J. H. _Area Research: Theory and Practice._ (SSRC Bulletin
No. 63) New York, 1950, pp. xix and 164.
— “The Slavonic Conference at Richmond (Va).” _Slavonic Review_,
III (March, 1925), pp. 684–93.
Tolpin, J. G. “Teaching of Scientific Russian.” _American Slavic
Review_, IV (August, 1945), pp. 158–64.
Vakar, N. P. “Teaching Russian Civilization.” _AATSEEL Bulletin_, VI
(June, 1949), pp. 101–3.
— “Teaching Russian Civilization.” _AAUP Bulletin_ XXXV (Winter,
1949), pp. 651–60.
Wellemeyer, J. F., Jr. and M. H. North. “American Personnel in Asian,
African and Eastern European Studies.” [Mimeographed preliminary
analysis]. (ACLS) Washington, 1953.
Wiener, Leo. “The Teaching of the Slavonic Languages.” _Training for
Foreign Service._ (U.S. Bureau of Education Bulletin No. 27)
Washington, 1921, pp. 136–8.
Wiren, A. R. “The Russian Student Fund 1920–1945.” _Russian Review_, V
(Autumn, 1945), pp. 104–13.
Zenkovsky, S. A. “Periodicals in the Russian Language Program.”
_AATSEEL Bulletin_, XI (September, 1953), pp. 9–11.
Index
Abel, Samuel, 56.
Alliance College, 39, 49, 70, 71.
American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 68.
American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages,
70.
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 18.
American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, 79.
American Council of Learned Societies, 59, 75.
American Council on Foreign Relations, 27, 50, 68.
American Historical Association, 26, 56, 70.
American Relief Commission, 107.
_American Slavic and East European Review_, 68, 69, 89.
Andrews, Arthur I., 33.
Archipenko, Alexander, 49.
_Armenian Review_, 69.
Armstrong, Hamilton F., 27.
Armstrong, John A., 78.
Army Language School, 67.
Bachinsky, Dr., 14.
Bacon, Leonard C., 29.
Baranov, Aleksander, 6, 7.
Barta, Alois, 42.
Bender, Harold H., 33.
Bergson, Abram, 68.
Bienowski, Count, 5.
Bilmanis, Dr., 86.
Birkenmeyer, Joseph, 60.
Bloomfield, Maurice, 25.
Bowring, Sir John, 19.
Brookings Institute, 49.
Bures, Vaclav, 40.
Burnett, Col., 59.
Burnham, James, 77.
Butler, Nicholas M., 52, 62.
Cadet School of Warsaw, 5.
California, University of, 27, 28, 29, 47, 51, 56, 57, 58, 59, 66, 67,
74.
Cambridge University, 25.
Capek, Thomas, 58.
Carnegie Corporation, 81.
Carroll College, 21.
Chekhov Publishing House, 78.
Chicago, University of, 27, 30, 34, 47, 50, 68, 69.
Chubaty, Nicholas, 64, 69.
Churchill, Marlborough, 46.
Chyzhevsky, Dmytro, 72.
Clarke, James F., 79.
Cleveland Public Library, 57.
Coe College, 42.
Coleman, Arthur P., 51, 65, 70.
Colorado, University of, 68.
Columbia University, 25, 31, 32, 33, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56,
58, 59, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 79.
Comenius (Komensky), Jan A., 4.
Conant, Kenneth J., 54.
Coolidge, Archibald C., 26.
Cornell University, 65.
Crane, Charles R., 30.
Creighton University, 47.
Cressey, George B., 68.
Croatian Academy of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 72.
Croatian National Alliance, 12.
Cross, Samuel H., 53, 54, 58, 59, 67, 68, 74.
Cundy, Percival, 92.
Curtin, Jeremiah, 21.
Czechoslovak National Alliance, 12.
Darbinian, Reuben, 69.
Dartmouth College, 48, 52, 69.
Dawson, Clarence, 56.
Denver, University of, 66.
Deutsch, Babette, 34.
Dobriansky, Leo, 76.
Doroshenko, Dmytro, 49.
Drizari, Nelo, 52.
Dubuque College and Seminary, 42.
Duggan, Stephan P., 33.
Dumbarton Oaks, 84.
Dyboski, Roman, 50.
East European Fund, Inc., 78, 105.
Ecole des Langues Orientales, Paris, 32.
Eliseeff, Serge, 48.
Fay, Sidney B., 34.
Faymonville, Philip, 59.
Feleky Library, 108.
Fisher, H. H., 68.
Fitch, Graham D., 46.
Ford Foundation, 78, 81.
Fordham University, 68, 72, 74.
_Foreign Affairs_, 27.
Foreign Language Information Service, 41.
Francis Skorina Society (Kryvian), 71.
Franklin, Benjamin, 17.
Freiburg, University of, 26.
Gallitzin (Golitsyn), Prince Dimitry, 6.
Gent, William, 47.
Georgetown University, 48, 57, 74, 76.
Gerschenkron, Alexander, 68.
Gilman, Pres., 25.
Golder, Frank A., 27, 30.
Golitsyn (Gallitzin), Prince Dimitry, 6.
Granovsky, Alexander, 49.
Graves, W., 59.
Haiman, Mieczyslaw, 38.
Hairenik Association, 69.
Halecki, Oskar, 64, 68, 72.
Hapgood, Isabel F., 23.
Harper, Samuel N., 30, 47, 55, 68.
Harvard University, 4, 6, 25, 26, 27, 28, 41, 47, 48, 53, 54, 56, 58,
67, 72, 73, 98.
Haupt, Paul, 25.
Hayne, Frank L., 59.
Hawkes, Dean H., 53.
Hecker, Julius F., 34.
Herrman, Augustine, 4.
Heyberger, Anna, 42.
Hoover, Herbert, 107.
Hoover War Library, 56.
House, Edward M., 27, 34, 46.
Hrbek, Jeffrey D., 40.
Hrbkova, Sarka B., 41, 54.
Hrdlicka, Ales, 33.
Indiana, University of, 79.
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 79.
Institute for Study of the USSR, Munich, 79.
International Baptist Seminary, 42.
Iowa, University of, 40, 41, 42, 65.
Jakobson, Roman, 64, 68, 73, 74.
Jaszy, Oskar, 40.
Jefferson, Thomas, 7.
Jena, University of, 33.
Joffe, Judah A., 31.
Johns Hopkins University, 25, 31.
Joint Committee on Slavic Studies, 68, 75.
Jones, R. W., 48.
_Journal of Central European History_, 69.
_Journal of East European History_, 69.
Karpovich, Michael, 54, 68, 74.
Kaun, Alexander, 28, 67, 74.
Kaunas, University of, 65.
Kelly, Eric P., 48, 52.
Kennan, George, 22, 79.
Kennan, George F., 79.
Kerner, Robert J., 27, 28, 55, 68, 74.
Knizek, Charles, 42.
Kodiak, 6, 7.
Komensky (Comenius), Jan A., 4.
Komensky Educational Clubs, 40.
Kosciuszko Foundation, 50, 72.
Kosciuszko, Tadeusz, 5, 6, 18.
Koshits, Alexander, 49.
Koukol, Alois E., 32.
Kovach, Michael, 5.
Kovalevsky, Maxim, 30.
Krakow, University of, 29, 60.
Kridl, Manfred, 64, 73.
Lafayette College, 47, 54.
Lanz, Henry, 30, 67.
Leacock, Stephen, 51.
Ledbetter, Eleanor, 57.
Lednicki, Waclaw, 64, 68, 74.
Lee, Charles, 5.
Lerando, Leon Z., 42, 47, 54.
Le Tallec, Paul, 56.
Lewis, John D., 18.
Lewis, William D., 18, 19.
Library of Congress, 56.
Lisovsky, Adm., 21.
Liverpool, University of, 30.
London, University of; School of Slavonic and East European Studies,
30, 48, 52, 55.
Lord, Eric, 56.
Lord, Robert H., 28.
Magoun, Francis P., Jr., 54.
Mandell, Max S., 32, 33.
Manitoba, University of, 101.
Manning, Clarence A., 32, 51, 52, 53, 55, 63, 68, 96.
Marquette University, 72, 74.
Martinovitch, Nicholas N., 49.
Maryland, University of, 48.
Masaryk Institute, 72.
Masaryk, Thomas G., 14.
Maslenikov, Oleg, 66, 74.
Matice Vyssoho Vzdelani, 39.
McCroskey, Benjamin B., 47.
McGill University, 51.
Meader, Clarence L., 33.
Mediaeval Academy of America, 84.
Mencken, H. L., 101.
Menges, Karl H., 53.
Menut, Albert, 65.
Michela, Joseph A., 59.
Michigan, University of, 33, 49.
Mid-European Studies Center, 79.
Milyukov, Paul, 30.
Minnesota, University of, 49.
Mirsky, Prince D. S., 52.
Miskovsky, Louis F., 39.
Missouri, University of, 55.
Mitana, Thaddeus, 49.
Modern Language Association of America, 55, 69.
Mogilat, Elena T., 51, 59.
Mohrenschildt, D. von, 69.
Monroe, Will S., 33.
Morawski-Nawench, Albert, 32.
Mosely, Philip S., 50, 68.
Murray, W. S., 33.
Myshuha, Luke, 14.
NRA, 58.
Nebraska, University of, 34, 40, 41, 47.
New Jersey Normal School, Montclair, 33.
New York Public Library, 56.
New York State Historical Society, 107.
New York University, 33, 77.
Niemciewicz, Juljusz U., 6.
Notre Dame University, 40, 74.
Noyes, George R., 28, 29, 51, 55, 68.
Oberlin College, 39.
Odlozilik, Otokar, 64.
Ohio State University, 42.
Oxford University, 25.
Paderewski, Ignace J., 14.
Pares, Sir Bernard, K.B.E., 30, 55.
Pasvolsky, Leo, 49.
Patrick, George Z., 29, 58, 59, 66, 67, 74.
Pennsylvania, University of, 65, 68.
Percival, James G., 19.
Phelps, William Lyon, 32.
Piatkowski, Romuald, 39.
Pipal, F. J., 40.
Pisek, Rev. Vincent, 58.
Pittsburgh, University of, 54.
_Poland_, 56.
Polish Historical Society, 38.
Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America; _Bulletin_, 64, 71.
Polish National Alliance, 12, 39.
_Polish Review_, 69.
Polish Roman Catholic Union, 12, 38, 108.
Posin, Jack A., 59, 65.
Prince, John D., 31, 51, 53, 67, 94, 96.
Princeton University, 25, 33, 34.
Prokosch, B., 42.
Pulaski, Casimir, 5, 18.
Pupin, Michael I., 14, 31, 58.
Radio Free Europe, 79.
Radosavljevich, Paul R., 33.
Rejcha, Frank, 40.
Reshetar, John, 78.
Rezanov, Nikolay, 6, 7.
Robinson, Rev. Edward, 20.
Robinson, Geroid T., 50, 68, 73.
Rockefeller Foundation, 81.
Rose, William J., 48.
Rosicky, John, 40.
Rostovtseff, M., 48.
Rudnyckyj, Jaroslav, 101.
Rumford, Count Benjamin T., 17.
Russian Orthodox Seminary, 42.
_Russian Review_, 69.
St. Basil’s College, 57, 71.
St. Francis Seminary, 38.
St. Mary’s Seminary, 38.
St. Procopius College, 38, 57.
St. Vincent College, 38.
St. Vladimir’s Russian Orthodox Seminary, 53.
Santa Barbara Mission, 3.
Schmitt, Bernadotte, 34.
Schuyler, Eugene, 21.
Senn, Alfred, 65, 68.
Serb National Federation, 12.
Serb National University, 72.
Seton-Watson, R. W., 55, 56.
Severa, G. F., 39.
Shelikov, Grigory, 6, 7.
Shevchenko Scientific Society, 71, 105, 108.
Shevelov, George, 72.
Shipman, A. J., 34.
Shishmanov, Dimitar, 52.
Simek, Bohumil, 39, 40.
Simkhovich, Vladimir, 33.
Simmons, Ernest J., 53, 55, 65, 68, 73.
Slabey, Rev. Andrew, 42.
_Slavic and East European Journal_, 70.
_Slavonic and East European Review_, 55, 68, 89.
_Slovan Americky_, 38.
Slovanska Lipa Society, 36.
Smal-Stocki, Roman, 72, 74, 77.
Smith College, 34.
Smithsonian Institution, 33.
Social Science Research Council, 75.
Society for Advancement of Slavonic Study, 54, 55.
Southern California, University of, 57.
Spector, Ivar, 57.
_Speculum_, 53, 69.
Stanoyevich, Milivoy S., 32.
Stanford University, 27, 30, 49, 56, 67, 68, 107.
Stepanek, Orin, 41, 47.
Strakhovsky, Leonid I., 48, 68.
Strassburg, University of, 53.
Struve, Gleb, 74.
Subotic, D., 52.
Syracuse, University of, 65, 68.
Talvj, 20.
Texas, University of, 42, 47.
Thomson, S. H., 68, 69.
Tikhon, Patriarch, 13.
Timoshenko, Stephen, 49.
Timoshenko, Volodymyr, 49.
Toronto, University of, 48.
Tufts College, 33.
Turkevich, Rev. Leonid, 42.
Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences, 71, 108.
Ukrainian Free University, 49, 96.
Ukrainian Museums, 108.
Ukrainian National Association, 12, 63, 96.
Ukrainian Providence Association, 12.
_Ukrainian Quarterly_, 69.
Ukrainian Workingmen’s Association, 12.
Unbegaun, Boris, 53.
Van Deman, Ralph, 46.
Vasilieff, A. A., 48.
Vasmer, Max, 53.
Vernadsky, George, 48, 68.
Vienna, University of, 32.
Vocadlo, Otakar, 52.
Walsh, Rev. Edmund, 57.
Washington, University of, 57.
White Ruthenian Institute of Arts and Sciences, 71.
Whitfield, Francis J., 68.
Wiener, Leo, 26, 27, 28, 53.
Wisconsin, University of, 28, 33, 42, 47, 60.
Yale University, 19, 21, 25, 32, 56, 68.
Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, 32, 34.
Yeaton, Ivan, 59.
Zeboroski (Zabriskie), 3.
Zenger, John Peter, 5.
Zinzendorf, Count, 4.
-----
Footnote 1:
W. H. Prescott, _Conquest of Peru_, Philadelphia, (1902), II, p. 199.
Footnote 2:
Professor Otokar Vocadlo of the University of Bratislava visited in
1929 some of the missions and came to the conclusion that they
included Slavic monks.
Footnote 3:
M. Haiman, _Polish Past in America, 1608–1865_ (Chicago: _Polish Roman
Catholic Union_).
Footnote 4:
J. D. Prince, “The Jersey Dutch Dialect,” _Dialect Notes, III_,
(1910), pp. 459–484. The usual modern form is “Zabriskie.”
Footnote 5:
Thomas Capek, _Augustin Herrman zakladatel Bohemia Manor r. 1660 a
autor mapy statu Virginie a Marylandu_. (Praha: Vytiskla statni
tiskarna, 1930); _Dictionary of American Biography_ (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1932), VIII, p. 592.
Footnote 6:
Robert J. Kerner, _Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century_ (New York:
Macmillan, 1932), p. 315.
Footnote 7:
Clarence Manning, _Soldier of Liberty, Casimir Pulaski_ (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1945), p. 253.
Footnote 8:
M. Haiman, _Poland and the American Revolutionary War_ (Chicago:
Polish Roman Catholic Union, 1932).
Footnote 9:
For data on Major General Charles Lee, see _ibid._, p. 4.
Footnote 10:
For data on Prince Gallitzin (Golitsyn), _cf._ _Dictionary of American
Biography_ (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1932), VIII, p. 113; D.
Sargent: _Mitri, The Story of Prince Demitrius Augustine Gallitzin_,
1770–1840 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., Inc., 1945).
Footnote 11:
H. C. Brown, _Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York_, New Series
I (New York: Valentine Co., 1916), p. 24.
Footnote 12:
Haiman, _op. cit._, p. 178.
Footnote 13:
Clarence Manning, _Russian Influence in Early America_ (New York:
Library Publisher, 1953), pp. 17–142.
Footnote 14:
Thomas Capek, _History of the Bohemians (Czechs) in America_ (Chicago,
1920); Rose Rosicky, _A History of Czechs (Bohemians) in Nebraska_
(Omaha; Czech Historical Society of Nebraska, 1929), p. 33 ff.
Footnote 15:
There is a large literature on various facets of this mass
immigration: T. Capek, _The History of the Bohemians (Czechs) in
America_; the works of various Polish sociologists; _Propamyatna
Knyha_ (_Jubilee Book_ of the Ukrainian National Association), (Jersey
City, N.J.: Svoboda Press, 1936); M. I. Pupin, _From Immigrant to
Inventor_ (New York: Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1923).
Footnote 16:
Clarence A. Manning, _Russian Influence in Early America_; also, the
following articles on the history and development of Russian
institutions—Bishop Leonty, “History of Russian Orthodox Church in
America,” _Russian Orthodox Journal_, Vol. XVI, No. 11, 12 (March-Apr.
1943); Vol. XVII, No. 2, 4, 11 (June, Aug. 1944, March 1945); Vol.
XVIII, No. 2, 4, 11 (June, Aug. 1945, March 1946); Vol. XIX, No. 4, 6
(Aug., Oct. 1946).
Footnote 17:
Cf., A. P. Coleman, “A New England City and the November Uprisings,”
_Annals of the Polish Roman Catholic Union Archives and Museum_,
(Chicago, 1939), IV, p. 31 ff.
Footnote 18:
_Dictionary of American Biography_, XI, p. 226; L. Wiener, _Anthology
of Russian Literature_ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s 1902–3), I, viii; II,
v.
Footnote 19:
_Dictionary of American Biography_, XIV, p. 460; A. P. Coleman, “James
Gates Percival and Slavonic Culture,” _Slavia_, (San Francisco), XVI,
No. 3, pp. 65–75.
Footnote 20:
For Talvj (Mrs. Edward Robinson), see _Dictionary of American
Biography_, XVI, p. 55; L. Wiener, _op. cit._, I, ix.
Footnote 21:
_Dictionary of American Biography_, IV, p. 608.
Footnote 22:
_Ibid._, XVI, p. 471.
Footnote 23:
_Ibid._, X, p. 331.
Footnote 24:
_Ibid._, VIII, p. 233.
Footnote 25:
For the general history of Slavic studies during the period, see:
Kerner, “Slavonic Studies in America,” _Slavonic Review_, III, pp.
244–258; Manning, “Slavonic Studies in the United States,” _Modern
Language Journal_, XIII (1929), pp. 280–288; XIX (1935), pp. 425–432;
“Polish and the American Universities,” _Poland America_, (N.Y.) XIII,
pp. 489–491.
Footnote 26:
For Coolidge, see _Dictionary of American Biography_, IV, p. 393.
Footnote 27:
For a recent description of this, see George Kennan, _Russia Leaves
the War_, (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1956).
Footnote 28:
_Cf._ _Propamyatna Knyha_ (Jubilee Book), especially, O. Stetkevych
(Joseph Stetkewych), “Ukrayinske Shkilnytstvo v Amerytsi,” pp. 325 ff.
Footnote 29:
Thomas Capek, _History of the Bohemians (Czechs) in America_, p. 241
f.
Footnote 30:
Facts concerning the history of Alliance college have been supplied by
President Coleman.
Footnote 31:
Concerning Oberlin, cf. “Teaching of Area and Language Course in the
Field of Slavic and East European Studies,” _American Slavic and East
European Review_, IV (1945), pp. 85 ff.
Footnote 32:
Rosicky, _op. cit._, pp. 412 ff.
Footnote 33:
_Ibid._, pp. 422 ff.
Footnote 34:
Thomas Capek, _History of Bohemians (Czechs) in America_.
Footnote 35:
C. W. Hasek, _The Slavonic Languages and Literatures in American
Colleges and Universities_ (Washington, 1920); Manning, “Slavonic
Studies in the United States,” _Modern Language Journal_, XIX, (1935),
pp. 425 ff.; “Slavonic Group of the Modern Language Association of
U.S.A. (Slavonic Group),” _Slavonic Review_, XI (1933), p. 521; “The
University and East European Cultures,” _Columbia University
Quarterly_, XXXIII (1941), pp. 242–251; “Die slawische Wissenschaft in
den Vereinigten Staaten,” _Osteuropa_, V (1930), pp. 171–176.
Footnote 36:
Kelly left Slavonic studies in 1929 to take up journalism. For details
on his career, _cf._ _Who’s Who In America_, Vol. 29, p. 1380.
Footnote 37:
_Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America_, I,
p. 161, carries the obituary of Joseph Birkenmeyer.
Footnote 38:
Oleg Maslenikov, “Slavic Studies in America, 1939–1946,” _Slavonic
Review_ (1947), XXV, pp. 528–537.
Footnote 39:
Obituaries of these leaders appear as follows: Prince, _American
Slavic and East European Review_, IV; Cross, _ibid._, V; Lanz,
_ibid._, IV; Patrick, _ibid._, IV; Kaun, _ibid._, IV.
Footnote 40:
M. J. Nagurney, “The Teaching of Ukrainian in the U.S.,” _American
Slavic and East European Review_, IV (1945), pp. 186–194.
Footnote 41:
Noyes, “Slavic Languages at the University of California,” _Slavonic
Review_ (American Series III, 1944), XXII, pp. 53–60.
Footnote 42:
I. Spector, “Russian Studies in the Pacific Northwest,” _Slavonic
Review_ (American Series III, 1944), XXII, pp. 61–69.
Footnote 43:
P. N. Malevsky-Malevich, _ed._, _Russia-USSR_ (New York, 1933), p. 65.
Footnote 44:
_Third Annual Report_, 1953–1954, The East European Fund, Inc. (New
York, 1954), pp. 48, 86.
Footnote 45:
_Area Study Program—The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe_, (University
of Illinois, 1955), p. 37.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE MARQUETTE SLAVIC STUDIES
Published by the Marquette University Press
Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin
I. _The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin_ (1955) by
Eugene Pyziur.
II. _Hitler’s Occupation of Ukraine (1941–1944)_ (1956) by Ihor
Kamenetsky.
III. _History of Slavic Studies in the United States_ (1957) by
Clarence A. Manning.
_Available in paper or case bindings._ _Prices on application._
History of Slavic Studies in the United States
Both World Wars during the twentieth century originated in the Slavic
countries and in the efforts of various Slavic groups to obtain and
retain their national independence and the right to their own language
and culture. Currently, Russian Communist imperialism overshadows the
Slavic countries, once again threatening their national heritage and
creating new world tensions.
Since aggression in the Slavic countries has twice resulted in global
wars, the United States, as well as the entire Western world, has begun
to concentrate attention upon the Slavs, their history, their culture,
their aspirations.
One phenomenon which sharply differentiates the scope of Slavic and East
European studies in the United States from the purely academic studies
elsewhere in the world, is the presence in this country of ten million
Slavic immigrants and their descendents, who have played an increasingly
vital role in our national culture by blending their native qualities,
knowledge and traditions into the American heritage.
Public and educational leaders in the United States are seriously
supporting attempts to develop a Slavic scholarship commensurate with
American educational traditions. _A History of Slavic Studies in the
United States_ points to the gradual evolution of Slavic and East
European studies in this country and points out some of the more hopeful
paths for future education, so that the United States may make the best
use of the resources, both intellectual and material, that it has at its
disposal.
[Illustration: MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS]
THE MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1131 W. Wisconsin Avenue,
Milwaukee 3, Wisconsin
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last
chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF SLAVIC STUDIES IN THE UNITED STATES ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
