“... scorn for the idea that there could be a society free of selfishness and the wish to dominate. Nikolai Bukharin, the theoretician of world Communism, supposed that a war between two Communist states was ‘an impossibility by definition’. Niebuhr quotes the Bukharin axiom and comments that such self-overcoming is improbable for Communism and equally ...”

“... for an infusion of Old Church Slavonic, the archaic tongue of the Orthodox liturgy; others, led by Nikolai Karamzin (Russia’s first professional writer, Hoogenboom calls him), embraced the influence of French, German and English literature and sought a more conversational form of prose. Pushkin sided with Karamzin, but came to feel his predecessor was too ...”