Slavonic & East European Review (93: 3) July 2015
Author: Martyn Rady, Dr
Publisher:
Published: 2015-07-01
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 9781781882047
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe July 2015 issue of Slavonic & East European Review
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Czesław Miłosz's Faith in the Flesh
Author: Stanley Bill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-01-15
Total Pages: 215
ISBN-13: 0192844393
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book presents Czeslaw Milosz's poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish Nobel laureate saw the reductive biologization of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues that his response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. Within the framework of a hesitant Christian faith, Milosz's poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence are not exclusively affirmative. The book traces his diverse representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through to positive images of the body as the source of religious experience, the self, and his own creative faculty. It also examines the complex relations between masculine and feminine bodies or forms of subjectivity, as Milosz represents them. Finally, it elucidates his contention that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions, because it also combines disembodied, symbolic meanings with the sensual meanings of sound and rhythm. For Milosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.
A New Rival State?
Author: Alexander Massov
Publisher: ANU Press
Published: 2018-10-18
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 1760462292
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA New Rival State? is a unique collection of dispatches written in 1857–1917 by the Russian consuls in Melbourne to the Imperial Russian Embassy in London and the Russian Foreign Ministry in St Petersburg. Written by eight consuls, they offer a Russian view of the development of the settler colonies in the late nineteenth century and the first years of the federated Commonwealth of Australia. They cover the federalist movement, the changing domestic political situation, labour politics, the treatment of the Indigenous population, the ‘White Australia’ policy, Australia’s defensive capacity and foreign policy as part of the British Empire. The bulk of the material is drawn from the Russian-language collection The Russian Consular Service in Australia 1857–1917, edited by Alexander Massov and Marina Pollard (2014), using documents from the archive of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Into Russian Nature
Author: Alan D. Roe
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 0190914556
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Into Russian Nature examines the history of the Russian national park movement. Russian biologists and geographers had been intrigued with the idea of establishing national parks before the Great October Revolution, but pushed the Soviet government successfully to establish nature reserves (zapovedniki) during the USSR's first decades. However, as the state pushed scientists to make zapovedniki more "useful" during the 1930s, some of the system's staunchest defenders started supporting tourism in them. In the decades after World War II, the USSR experienced a tourism boom and faced a chronic shortage of tourism facilities. Also during these years, Soviet scientists took active part in Western-dominated international environmental protection organizations where they became more familiar with national parks. In turn, they enthusiastically promoted parks for the USSR as a means to reconcile environmental protection and economic development goals, bring international respect to Soviet nature protection efforts, and help instil a love for the country's nature and a desire to protect it in Russian/Soviet citizens. By the late 1980s, their supporters pushed transformative, in some cases quixotic, park proposals. At the same time, national park opponents presented them as an unaffordable luxury during a time of economic struggle, especially after the USSR's collapse. Despite unprecedented collaboration with international organizations, Russian national parks received little governmental support as they became mired in land-use conflicts with local populations. While the history of Russia's national parks illustrates a bold attempt at reform, the state's failure's to support them has left Russian park supporters deeply disillusioned. "--
Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904–1945
Author: Lili Zách
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2021-07-29
Total Pages: 326
ISBN-13: 3030778134
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffering a unique account of identity formation in Ireland and Central Europe, this book explores and contextualises transfers and comparisons between Ireland and the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It reveals how Irish perceptions of borders and identities changed after the (re)birth of the small states of Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the creation of the Irish Free State. Adopting a transnational approach, the book documents the outward-looking attitude of Irish nationalists and provides original insights into the significance of personal encounters that transcended the borders of nation-states. Drawing on a wide range of official records, private papers, contemporary press accounts and journal articles, Imagining Ireland Abroad, 1904-1945 bridges the gap between historiographies of the East and West by opening up a new perspective on Irish national identity.
Translated and Visiting Russian Theatre in Britain, 1945–2015
Author: Cynthia Marsh
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-05-18
Total Pages: 399
ISBN-13: 3030443337
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book tackles questions about the reception and production of translated and untranslated Russian theatre in post-WW2 Britain: why in British minds is Russia viewed almost as a run-of-the-mill production of a Chekhov play. Is it because Chekhov is so dominant in British theatre culture? What about all those other Russian writers? Many of them are very different from Chekhov. A key question was formulated, thanks to a review by Susannah Clapp of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country: have the British staged a ‘Russia of the theatrical mind’?
Witnessing Stalins Justice
Author: Kelly J. Evans
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-08-10
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1350338206
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWitnessing Stalin's Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin's Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union's Great Purge.
Life of Permafrost
Author: Pey-Yi Chu
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1487501935
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy tracing the English word permafrost back to its Russian roots, this unique intellectual history uncovers the multiple, contested meanings of permafrost as a scientific idea and environmental phenomenon.
Literature and Film from East Europe’s Forgotten "Second World"
Author: Gordana P. Crnkovic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2021-05-06
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1501370669
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCzechoslovakia, Yugoslavia-no longer on the map. East Europe of the socialist period may seem like a historical oddity, apparently so different from everything before and after. Yet the masterpieces of literature and cinema from this largely forgotten “Second World,” as well as by the authors formed in it and working in its aftermath, surprise and delight with their contemporary resonance. This book introduces and illuminates a number of these works. It explores how their aesthetic ingenuity discovers ways of engaging existential and universal predicaments, such as how one may survive in the world of victimizations, or imagine a good city, or broach the human boundaries to live as a plant. Like true classics of world art, these novels, stories, and films-to rephrase Bohumil Hrabal-keep “telling us things about ourselves we don't know.” In lively and jargon-free prose, Gordana P. Crnkovic builds on her rich teaching experience to create paths to these works and reveal how they changed lives.
Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union
Author: Erica L. Fraser
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2019-04-08
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 1442624728
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCatastrophic wartime casualties and postwar discomfort with the successes of women who had served in combat roles combined to shatter prewar ideals about what service meant for Soviet masculine identity. The soldier had to be re-imagined and resold to a public that had just emerged from the Second World War, and a younger generation suspicious of state control. In doing so, Soviet military culture wrote women out and attempted to re-establish soldiering as the premier form of masculinity in society. Military Masculinity and Postwar Recovery in the Soviet Union combines textual and visual analysis, as well as archival research to highlight the multiple narratives that contributed to rebuilding military identities. Each chapter visits a particular site of this reconstruction, including debates about conscription and evasion, appropriate role models for cadets, misogynist military imagery in cartoons, the fraught militarized workplaces of nuclear physicists, and the first cohort of cosmonauts, who represented the completion of the project to rebuild militarized masculinity.
