AN UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF FATHER CHRISTOVAL DE VEGA S.J.: Its Importance for the History of the Second Mission to the Mughal Court and for the Knowledge of the Religion of the Emperor Akbar

Author(s):  
Svetlana V. Bliznyuk ◽  

This article contains two sources concerning the history of Russia and Cyprus: an unknown and previously unpublished letter of King Hugh IV of Lusignan of Cyprus to Giovanna, Queen of Naples, and a work of an unknown Russian author of the seventeenth century about the victory of the Cypriot Christian army over the Turks. A textual and comparative analysis of both sources carried out in the article proves a borrowing of information by the Russian author from the letter of the Cypriot king. The work of the anonymous author is an almost liberal literary translation of Hugh’s letter. At the same time, the Russian translator did not borrow the plot of the letter directly, but most likely through later Cypriot literature, in which the story told by the Cypriot king was probably extremely popular. The events of the history of Cyprus of different times intertwine in the Russian text in order to show the heroic past of Cyprus. The Russian author dates his story to 552 and connects it with Emperor Justinian I, the most revered and heroic Byzantine ruler. He cannot separate the history of Cyprus from the history of Byzantium, just as the Cypriot and Greek-Byzantine authors of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries could not do it. However, both texts speak of Latin Crusaders, who are fighting against the Turks under the leadership of the King of Cyprus. The Russian author remains faithful to the Orthodox tradition of rejection of the idea of crusades and replaces the idea of martyrdom of a crusader in the name of the Lord with heroic battle scenes traditional for Russian literature. He acknowledges that warriors are fighting for the Christian faith and for the church but denies the idea of guaranteed salvation and eternal life for military feats. At the end of the article, the full text of the letter of Hugh IV of Lusignan based on a manuscript of the fifteenth century kept in the manuscript department of the Bavarian State Library is published.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
A. S. Bodrova ◽  
◽  

The article focuses on the history of the literary exchange between E. A. Baratynsky and A. I. Turgenev, demonstrating their standings in the literary fi eld of the 1820s — the first half of the 1830s. Analyzing an unpublished letter by Baratynsky, the author offers a detailed reconstruction of the episode where the poet managed to present to Turgenev a pre-print copy of his Collected Poems (Stikhotvoreniia, 1835), and thus clarifi es the publication history of this collection.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Garrison

The Victorian fascination with the influence of technology on human vision led to a proliferation of replications of its effects in all manner of media, including novel writing. Like the kaleidoscope that holds the viewer in thrall, M. E. Braddon's sensation novel Eleanor's Victory, as this reviewer describes, holds a certain “power” over the reader that forces her to listen to, if not accept, the arguments Braddon posits in her work. “Power” is at issue in other ways in Braddon's work as her heroines continually seek ways of developing agency by shaping sexual identities that press the limits of the norm of the bourgeois family unit. What is also significant here is the appropriateness of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for Braddon's writing, a metaphor she used personally in describing her work in an unpublished letter: “I will give the kaleidoscope another turn, and will do my best with the old bits of glass and pins and rubbish” (letter to Edmund Yates, qtd. in Maxwell 150). The kaleidoscope fractures the vision of a single object or scene into a multitude of different but interrelated forms of the same. One of the prominent issues Braddon repeatedly addresses in her work is the construction of multiple forms of sexuality. The fracturing or multiplying effect of the kaleidoscope resembles the isolation and reduction of different forms of sexuality as described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality.


Author(s):  
R.M. Valeev ◽  
O.D. Vasilyuk ◽  
R.Z. Valeeva ◽  
S.A. Kirillina ◽  
S.A. Kirillina ◽  
...  

Academicians A.Y. Krymsky and V. A. Gordlevsky are important figures in the history of Russian classical orientalism and Arab-Muslim studies, in particular the Moscow center of Oriental studies, especially in the field of academic turkology, Ottoman, Arab and Iranian studies, as well as the public life of the Russian Empire and the USSR. They are widely known in the history of humanities in modern Russian Federation and Ukraine. Currently, we are conducting the search, study, systematization and publication of the correspondence by outstanding arabist, semitologist, turkologist, Iranian and Slavic studies scholar A.Y. Krymsky with leading Russian orientalists V.R. Rosen, V.V. Bartold, P.K. Kokovtsov, F.E. Korsch, V.A. Zhukovsky, S.F. Oldenburg, I.Y. Krachkovsky, N.A. Mednikov, V. A. Gordlevsky, B.V. Miller, V.F. Minorsky and other scholars during the period of 1890s to 1930s. The article is devoted to a brief overview of the activities of A. Y. Krymsky (1898 –1918) and V. A. Gordlevsky (1898 –1918) at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental languages and the publication of one extant letter by V. A. Gordlevsky from Konya (Turkey) to A. Y. Krymsky, from the collections of the Institute of Manuscripts of V.I. Vernadsky Scientific Library of Ukraine (Kiev)3 .


2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T Ambrose

The origin of tissue culture is commonly dated to 1907 and credited to Ross Harrison at Hopkins Medical School. But an unpublished letter from the 1942 offers a different interpretation and gives priority to Montrose Burrows with important contributions for the development of cell culture by Franklin Mall at Hopkins and Alexis Carrel at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. The early development of tissue culture is reviewed and its applications in modern biology and medicine are briefly outlined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-182
Author(s):  
Yulia Yukhnovich

The article deals with the history of the sale of the real estate property belonging to A. F. Kumanina, the Moscow aunt of F. M. Dostoevsky, in the Tula province. The division of the property received by her heirs after her death was to be carried out after their entry into the ownership of the estates: first Tula, then Smolensk and Ryazan, which were pledged. Lawyers played a criminal role in this process. They developed an illegal scheme during the division and sale of the house and land plot in Tula, which predetermined the fate of the Kumanin inheritance, most of which was spent on paying debts, arrears and attorney fees. In connection with the inheritance case, F. M. Dostoevsky sought legal assistance from V. P. Gaevsky, V. I. Veselovsky, B. B. Polyakov, V. I. Gubin, E. V. Korsh, A. V. Lokhvitsky, V. I. Lustikh. The facts testifying to the unseemly role of the attorneys, which ultimately led to the unexpected outcome of the “Kumanin story”, are presented in the memoirs and correspondence of the writer’s brother Andrey Mikhailovich. They are also indicated in the correspondence of the other heirs of A. F. Kumanina, including F. M. Dostoevsky and his closest relatives, who tried to regain the right to own hereditary estates, as well as the materials of the genealogic inventory of N. S. Lazarev-Stanishchev, who became one of the participants in the “Kumanin inheritance” scam. The Appendix contains a previously unpublished letter from D. A. Smirnov, assistant to attorney V. I. Veselovsky in the “case of the Kumanin inheritance”, to A. M. Dostoevsky dated February 10, 1874 about the sale of the Kumanin house in Tula.


1926 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 92-112
Author(s):  
William Miller

The following article, sent by Finlay to The Times on October 3, 1867, and corrected in proof and returned by him on September 5, 1868, was never published, but is preserved, like the similarly unpublished article on the same subject for Blackwood's Magazine, in both the corrected proof and a copy of the original manuscript in the Finlay Library. The longest of all his newspaper articles, it contains his view of the ‘great’ Cretan insurrection of 1866–69; and, together with his subsequent articles on the same subject published in The Times of December 18 and 25, 1868, January 8, 16 and 22, and February 5, 1869, may be regarded as a supplementary chapter of his History. As a contribution to the history of this insurrection, it may be compared with Ballot's Histoire de l'Insurrection Crétoise, Hilary Skinner's Roughing it in Crete in 1867, and The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 by Stillman, then U.S. Consul in Crete, and subsequently correspondent of The Times in Athens and Rome—all three eye-witnesses—and with such later works as Wagner's Der kretische Aufstand, 1866–67, and ῾Η διπλωματικὴ ῾Ιστιρία τη̑ς Κρητικη̑ς ᾿Επαναστάσεως του̑ 1866, by Papantonakes, published in 1926. Finlay paid two short visits to the island during the insurrection, one described in The Times of June 1, 1867, the other in an unpublished letter to that journal, dated June 11, 1868. I have added a few explanatory footnotes.


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