The Poet and the Woman

Author(s):  
Miklós Radnóti

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was a major Hungarian poet of the interwar period and Holocaust. Like his various volumes of poetry, the prose in this collection also combines traditional and modern themes and styles-and often produces unexpected results. Radnóti studied at what is today the University of Szeged and, in 1935, published his dissertation on the work of the novelist and poet Margit Kaffka (1880-1918). Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Radnóti also spent time in France and Czechoslovakia before World War II. After periods of forced labor in Ukraine and Serbia, he was executed near Győr on one of the death marches in 1944.This set of pre-war prose pieces spans a wide variety of settings, from peasant huts in Hungary to a bohemian nightclub in Venice, and from a ceramics studio to airports and battleships. The forms of the stories range from fables to triptychs of naturalistic vignettes, from spare, conversational narratives to a silent drama. As always, Radnóti’s emphasis is on emotions and people, whether they are writers, grieving children, booksellers, prostitutes, porters, or apprentices. More than anything, these are stories of lovers and love, dogged, irrepressible, illusion-free, and content-or at least natural.John K. Cox, the translator, is a professor of East European History at North Dakota State University.

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Shaul Katzir

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.


1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Ralph T. Fisher

AbstractHaving accepted Richard Hellie's flattering invitation to prepare an "old geezer's memoir" for this journal, I read with special fascination those contributed in 1988-90 by Sam Baron, Bob Byrnes, Nick Riasanovsky, and Don Treadgold. They bear out what Horace Lunt said in the Summer 1987 Slavic Review: The story of the Slavic field in North America since World War II is complex as well as important, and those who know about various parts of it should publish their recollections while they can. Even we old-timers sometimes need to be reminded how much we depend today on structures that are new since we began our own professional lives: big centers of Russian studies and big libraries to back them up; foundations that care about our field; the USDE's Title VI and the State Department's Title VIII programs; the AAASS and its affiliates with their conventions; the NEH; NCSEER, IREX, the Kennan Institute; vital tools like the CDSP, ABSEES, and guides to archives; and Radio Liberty, the CIA, and other govemment and non-government agencies doing important research and publication in our field. My assignment here is to tell my own story, with particular attention to one of those teaching and research institutions in which I have had a hand: the University of Illinois's Russian and East European Center and its affiliated Slavic and East European Library, in the prairie towns of Champaign and Urbana. I hope to convey what I experienced as someone who in youth did not-unlike some of my colleagues-seem to be pointed toward academic life, but was swept along in directions he did not foresee.


Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.


Author(s):  
Tim Watson

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.


Author(s):  
Richard M. Freeland

This book examines the evolution of American universities during the years following World War II. Emphasizing the importance of change at the campus level, the book combines a general consideration of national trends with a close study of eight diverse universities in Massachusetts. The eight are Harvard, M.I.T., Tufts, Brandeis, Boston University, Boston College, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts. Broad analytic chapters examine major developments like expansion, the rise of graduate education and research, the professionalization of the faculty, and the decline of general education. These chapters also review criticisms of academia that arose in the late 1960s and the fate of various reform proposals during the 1970s. Additional chapters focus on the eight campuses to illustrate the forces that drove different kinds of institutions--research universities, college-centered universities, urban private universities and public universities--in responding to the circumstances of the postwar years.


2021 ◽  
pp. 096777202110121
Author(s):  
Peter D Mohr ◽  
Stephanie Seville

George Archibald Grant Mitchell, OBE, TD, MB, ChB, ChM, MSc, DSc, FRCS (1906–1993) was a professor of anatomy at the University of Manchester from 1946 to 1973. He is mainly remembered for his research in neuroanatomy, especially of the autonomic nervous system. He studied medicine at the Aberdeen University, and after qualifying in 1929 he held posts in surgery and anatomy and worked as a surgeon in the Highlands. In 1939, he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. He was based in Egypt and the Middle East, where he carried out trials of sulphonamides and penicillin on wounded soldiers; in 1943, he returned to England as Adviser in Penicillin Therapy for 21 Army Group, preparing for the invasion of Europe.


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