scholarly journals The Testimonies of the 20s Generation in Private Writing: The Case of Albertas Dilys (1920–2000)

Literatūra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-77
Author(s):  
Ona Dilytė-Čiurinskienė
Keyword(s):  
Research Field ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Distinct Character ◽  
Vilnius University ◽  
Sociocultural Research ◽  
The One

The article employs the egodocumentary approach to examine how the private writings of Albertas Dilys (1920–2000), political prisoner and Lithuanian scholar of the 1920s generation, records and reflects upon his refusal to compromise under the circumstances of the Soviet occupation. Dilys was part of the generation who were born on the eve of the creation of the State of Lithuania – between 1917 and 1922 – and who, having graduated from the schools of the newly independent state, entered university by the end of 1930s with a distinct aim to contribute to the European culture worthy of a free nation. However, the Second World War and the alternating Nazi and Soviet occupations brought an end to these youthful ideals. Because the existential choices made by these young people pulled the generation apart and, in regard to the Soviet oppression, disseminated it both geographically and axiologically, defining its conceptual coherence is somewhat problematic. Yet, reflecting on separate individual choices may help us understand the people’s motivation and the paradigms which bring this generation together on the one hand and break it up on the other.Rather than appraise the decisive generational self-conceptions in the context of 1944, the case of Albertas Dilys enables us to look into the different manifestations of conscious existential resolve, its origins, and consequences. The notion of the 1920s generation here describes the humanities students with literary aspirations who first studied at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas and then at Vilnius University. As high-school pupils, most of them took part in the Ateitis movement, which was a Catholic organisation opposed to the Lithuanian government of the day. At university, they joined Šatrija, a society dedicated to the study of art, literature, and philosophy.At the centre of the present research are documents testifying to Dilys’ personal existential quest and self-realisation in the context of repressions and further oppression: his memories, correspondence, notes, journals. To frame the research material, the article makes partial use of intertextual and sociocritical analysis. Dilys’ egodocumentary accounts are examined in light of historically reliable biographical and background facts. This article aims to discover and highlight in Dilys’ egodocuments his testimonies of self-reflection, personal resolve and its consequences and, by means of comparative analysis, to look for similar premises in the accounts of other contemporaries in order to indicate the epistemological gaps in the research field of the 1920s generation.Dilys’ case is by no means typical; cases like his have been deemed marginal in most sociological and sociocultural research. The history of existential choices and reflection on it, as testified in Dilys’ egodocuments, have a distinct character: emphasis is placed on inner resistance, whose parallels extend into the spiritual maturity derived from youthful ideals, the quest for the meaning of life, and the adoption of an ethical position at the expense of career development and professional life and subjection to ostracism and relative poverty. This egodocumentary research reveals the complexity of uncompromising choices and their consequences in a repressive and oppressive society. Dilys’ egodocuments are strongly oriented toward the past as well as the ideal of youth and the pastoral world of the parental home. Similar utopian undertones and pathos as well as solidarity with the 1920s generation of idealists trapped in a historical downfall – characteristically, this generation is perceived from passéist perspective, in retro-spective projection that centers on the youthful past – crop up in the accounts of other former members of Šatrija. The paradigm of Dilys’ existential choices calls for a further inquiry into the life of the 1920s generation.

scholarly journals Authorial Self and Modernity as Reflected in Diaries and Memoirs. Three 19th-Century Hungarian Case Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.

scholarly journals Demographic Development of Russia in Geopolitical Coordinates of the XX – Early XXI Century

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-154
Author(s):  
Leonid L. Rybakovsky ◽  
◽  
Natalia I. Kozhevnikova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Potential ◽  
Demographic Development ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Demographic Dynamics ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The One

The article shows that due to the fact that Russia has the largest territory among the rest of the world, the richest natural resources, making it a self-sufficient, advantageous geographical position, as well as a kind of history of the creation and development of the state, in the past, and still causes hostile attitude to it a number of states. Thanks to sufficient human potential, Russia, constituting the core of a state united with other peoples in pre-revolutionary and Soviet times, was able to defend its homeland, even from such an enemy as Nazi Germany. The increase in the population of Russia has always been the most important factor in ensuring the security of the state. The paper provides a detailed description of the demographic development of Russia, both as part of the Soviet Union and as an independent state. The dynamics of the population of Russia is considered, on the one hand, in the group of countries with a predominance of the Slavic ethnos, and on the other hand, it is compared with the demographic dynamics of the English-speaking group of countries.

Hope, Despair, and Justice in Postwar European Culture: Bicycle Thieves, The Plague, and The Man Outside as Case Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Amir Engel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Emotional Disposition ◽  
Do So

Abstract While there is growing interest in the postwar era, the cultural characteristics of the period after World War II and the period’s historical scope are still largely underdetermined. The purpose of this article is to offer a more nuanced use of the term postwar and insights into the cultural landscape of this enormously significant moment in the history of the West. To do so, it examines three major works of what is termed here the immediate postwar. These works are fundamentally dissimilar and yet, it is argued, share an emotional disposition. As shown, all three works exhibit a complex dialectical coupling of horror and anticipation. In other words, this article demonstrates that the cultural production of the postwar period (in the exact sense of the term) is characterized, on the one hand, by a sincere depiction of suffering and depravity but, on the other, by an intense engagement with questions about the moral and social future.

CHRONICLE OF A COUP FORETOLD: VALENTINE MUSAKANYA AND THE 1980 COUP ATTEMPT IN ZAMBIA

2010 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-409
Author(s):  
MILES LARMER
Keyword(s):  
Civil Service ◽  
Political Prisoner ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Before And After ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Ruling Party ◽  
Coup Attempt

ABSTRACTZambia's unsuccessful coup attempt in 1980 was initiated by members of the country's intellectual and business elite, who had played a leading role in the postcolonial civil service and state bureaucracy, but who became disillusioned with the takeover of the state by the ruling party before and after the declaration of the one-party state in 1972. Among their number was Valentine Musakanya, one of those convicted for the coup attempt. Using Musakanya's biographical and other writings, this article explores his intellectual trajectory from head of the civil service to political prisoner. In so doing, it investigates the role of life writing in aiding understanding of the postcolonial political history of Africa.

Fichte’s Ethics on Radical Evil

2021 ◽  
pp. 153-164
Author(s):  
Andrey K. Sudakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Real Sequence ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Radical Evil ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Chain ◽  
The One ◽  
Restraining Force

Fichte constructs the general part of his early ethics as a philosophy of concrete freedom in the shape of a history of moral self-consciousness, and in the course of this construction he discovers something what he, in Kantian stile, may call a “radical evil in human nature”, that is, a force of “inertness to reflection and to activity in accordance with such reflection” inherent to human nature. Schelling and some contemporary authors recognize in Fichte’s doctrine of evil a symptom of his return to the ethical naturalism of the Enlightenment. An anal­ysis of the dynamics of moral reflection in the I according to Fichte shows, however, that, exactly as the I itself is for Fichte essentially a duality, a subject-object, so is each particular position in the movement of the self-reflection of the I, on the one hand, conditioned by this spiritual inertness of human nature, but that same inertness is, on the other hand, a chain with which human free­dom retains itself, and therefore actually inexistent as a restraining force for a free I, conscious of his own ethical vocation, so that its dwelling within the limits of the customary (in the invariability of consciousness) is the subject’s own fault as “non-use of freedom”. The spiritual inertness, as an empirical con­dition of possibility of a bad choice, is nevertheless in Fichte a spiritual force of a specific kind, active even there where ethical choice in the strict sense of the term is not (yet) at issue. Schelling’s reproof must therefore be acknowledged as invalid, exactly because the history of self-consciousness is, in Fichte’s ethics, not so much an exposition of a real sequence, as a transcendental reflec­tion of grounds.

scholarly journals Disciplining Media Studies: An Expanding Field and its (Self-) Definition

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Schröter
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Anglophone World

This chapter is a modified translation of the foreword to the Handbuch Medienwissenschaft(Handbook of Media Studies, Schröter ed.) published in Germany in 2014. The purpose ofthis handbook is to provide an overview of the vibrant and heterogeneous field ofkulturwissenschaftliche Medienwissenschaft – media studies as oriented toward humanitiesand cultural studies interests and approaches rather than those of communication studiesand the social sciences, subsequently referred to simply as “media studies.” Some of thecategories used to structure the handbook have been generated from the historicaldiscussions in the field; and inevitably, these same historical discussions have shown thedifficulties of defining the external boundaries of the field of media studies, its internaldifferentiations and the way they re-connect to traditional disciplines. It gives an overview ofthe history of the disciplinary constitution of ‘media studies’ with a special focus on differentapproaches to disciplinary self-reflection that have accompanied the field from the verybeginning.2 In this way, it introduces the reader to a variety of sources not very well known inthe Anglophone world. Therefore, the penultimate section of this chapter, originally titled “The structure of this handbook” might on the one hand appear to some to be too specific for the current volume. On the other hand, however, it serves as a concrete example of how the field may be configured.

scholarly journals PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS VIEWS OF FLORENSKY AND THE IDEA OF ACTUAL INFINITY

2019 ◽  
pp. 108-113
Author(s):  
Dmitry N. Radul ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Actual Infinity ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Potential Infinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

The article briefly observes the history of the idea of the actual infinity in European culture until the beginning of the 20th century. Special attention is paid to the role of Cantor set theory in reviving interest in the idea of actual infinity in Western Europe and Russia. The influence of the Cantor’s philosophy of religion on the Western European theology of the late 19th century - early 20th century is given. The influence of Cantor’s ideas on the formation of Florensky’s views is described. A detailed analysis of the application of the idea of actual infinity in the book “The Pillar and the Statement of Truth” is given. Florensky describes the understanding of the connection of Kant’s antinomical of reason and the idea of a potential infinity. The potential infinity is considered by Florensky as a source of imperfection and sinfulness. Special attention is paid to the understanding of truth as actual infinity. The introduction of the actual infinity allows Florensky to remove the one-sidedness of the law of identity and the law of sufficient basis in the Supreme unity...

PRINC EVGENIJE SAVOJSKI IZMEĐU PARIZA, BEČA I BEOGRADA

Lipar ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (75) ◽  
pp. 111-128
Author(s):  
Duško Lopandić
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Military Leader ◽  
Royal Court ◽  
European Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Decisive Victory ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

The paper presents the life and work of Eugene of Savoy, a famous military leader at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, whose achivements left a mark in the history of numerous countries, from Austria, through Germany, Italy and France, to Serbia. The biography of Prince Eugene has a mutinational, “pan-European” char- acter, bearing in mind that he came from an Italian family (princes of Savoy), that he was raised in the environment of the French royal court, and that he served three Habsburg emperors (Leopold I, Joseph I and Charles VI). Napoleon considered Eugene one of the seven greatest commanders of history.The article contains presentation of young years and military career of Prince Eugene, especially during the Great Turkish war (1683-1699) and after, includin presantation of crucial battles of Zenta (1687), Petrowaradin (1716) and Belgrade (1717). The Prince’s fame was secured with his decisive victory against the Ottomans at the Battle of Zenta in 1697, earning him Europe-wide fame. The Battle of Zenta proved to be the decisive victory in the long war against the Turks. Renewed hostilities against the Ottomans in the Austro-Turkish War consolidated his reputation, with victories at the battles of Petrovaradin (1716), and the decisive encounter at Belgrade (1717). Of all Eugene’s wars this was the one in which he exercised most direct control; it was also a war which, for the most part, Austria fought and won on her own. The war had dispelled the immediate Turkish threat to Hungary and was a triumph for the Empire and for Eugene personally. In the period after the Second World War, during the period of growing popularity of European integration and cooperation, as well as supranational ideas, there was a reinterpretation of the historical role of Eugene Savoy as an archetypal character “pan-European”, “hero of European culture”, “builder of Europe”. The period of the Austro-Turkish wars in which Prince Evgenije participated and his great victories over the Turks had an exceptional influence and significance on the history of the Serbian people (Great Migration 1690). A large number of Serbs also took part in the campaigns and battles led by Eugene of Savoy.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Theodor W. Adorno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).

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