The importance of Russia, her geopolitical standing, her language, literature and culture, is hard to overestimate. This is well understood in Washington but, sadly, not in Ithaca, N.Y. 

Russian professors received word Monday that the undergraduate Russian major will be frozen in the fall as part of administrative efforts to consolidate resources. 

Since Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977, a Swiss bank vault has guarded 138 pencil-written note cards that the writer of Lolita fame instructed to destroy. Thirty years later, copies of these cards, the unfinished draft of Nabokov’s last novel The Original of Laura, will be available today at the Cornell Store, one day prior to the global release date.