Russian Peasant Views of City Life, 1861-1914

Slavic Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Alpern Engel

In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs, increasing numbers of peasants left their native villages for cities and industrial centers, in response to a growing need for cash and declining opportunities to earn it at home. At least until World War I, the vast majority of these migrants were men; women were the more stable element in the village. In the words of one student of peasant life, women “cling to the family and the land, and need particularly unfavorable circumstances to compel them to move somewhere else.“ Nevertheless, as the nineteenth century drew to a close the economic circumstances that prompted peasant men to leave villages increasingly caused women to leave as well. Like their husbands, fathers and brothers, migrant women often chose urban destinations. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were 650 peasant women per 1,000 peasant men in Moscow, and 368 migrant peasant women for every 1,000 migrant peasant men in St. Petersburg; by 1910, the proportion in St. Petersburg had increased to 480 per 1,000.

1995 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 282-296

A quote that says much about John McMichael comes from his own autobiographical notes: ‘I come from a materially poor branch of a Galloway family’. He was born on 25 July 1904 in Gatehouse of Fleet, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, son of James and Margaret McMichael. There were two older sisters and two elder brothers, and he was something of an afterthought. His father ran a farm on the edge of the village and was also the local butcher. A ‘God-fearing, generous man’, he was not a good manager of his limited resources. Until he was ten years old John McMichael went to a school run under the patronage of the Lady of the Manor; but in 1914 this school was closed and he transferred to Girthon public school under its headmaster, William Learmonth, who was to have a major influence on the young McMichael. Learmonth’s son, eight years McMichael’s senior, became Sir James Learmonth, the well-known surgeon. Learmonth was an exceedingly capable teacher to find in a small village school and his pupils clearly felt the benefit. At the age of 14 there was a debate in the McMichael household about the next stage in John’s education. His mother, supported by Learmonth, decided he must continue and he moved to Kirkcudbright Academy, eight miles away, a hard and hilly bicycle ride. Here he blossomed, taking first place in most subjects, and ending up as Dux of the school. His decision to read medicine was influenced by two chance factors. He often spent his holidays with a fisherman on an island in the Fleet Bay where the solitary house was occupied by a doctor from the Indian Medical Service during his leaves. On wet days his medical books opened up exciting prospects in the schoolboy’s enquiring mind. During World War I a maternal cousin, Col. George Home, C.B.E., M.D., of the New Zealand Army Medical Corps, spent his leaves with the family and kindled a broad interest in science and medicine.


1972 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel J. Richards

The early years of the twentieth century prior to the outbreak of World War I have been described as a period in which the Liberal Party was in a state of decline. One significant aspect of this decline was the deterioration of what in the late nineteenth century has been labelled as political nonconformity. Gladstone's statement that Nonconformists supplied the backbone of British Liberalism perhaps best symbolises the political significance of this group for the vitality of the Liberal Party.


1995 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 342-357 ◽  

Norman Petch was born in Glasgow on 13 February 1917, the third child in a family of three boys and one girl. He had an English father who was a commercial traveller in drapery for most of his working life, and a Scottish mother. The family moved to England shortly after World War I, where most of his youth was spent in various parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire. He was not to live again in Scotland until relatively late in his career, when in 1973 he became Professor of Metallurgy at Strathclyde University. Despite this, he was proud of his Scottish origins, and had a great love of Scotland which was reflected in his eventual retirement to Culbokie in the Black Isle. Norman’s grandfather lived at Findon Cottage in Culbokie where he had been the agent for Sir George MacKenzie, a large landowner. His property, comprizing a delightful cottage and 10 acres, was a constant attraction to Norman from the age of two through his school years, and indeed throughout his life provided a serene environment in which to relax and to write, and finally a retirement haven. His education began in Yorkshire in the local school in the village of Aberford, where he exhibited an early interest in technology by making a crystal wireless set and by showing a mature knowledge of the workings of the family car. During the General Strike in 1926 Norman built a trolley from an old tin bath and pram wheels in order to transport logs from a nearby wood, as coal was unavailable at this time. He was clearly a contemplative child who played long games of chess with his father, and at an early age revealed a thoughtful attitude to life. In later years he was not a person to provide instant wisdom, but after mature reflection could be relied on to talk very good sense. His secondary education was principally at the Grammar School in Tadcaster, but completed at the West Leeds High School when the family moved to Leeds.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.


Author(s):  
Alistair Fox

This chapter analyses the earliest of the New Zealand coming-of-age feature films, an adaptation of Ian Cross’s novel The God Boy, to demonstrate how it addresses the destructive impact on a child of the puritanical value-system that had dominated Pākehā (white) society through much of the twentieth century, being particularly strong during the interwar years, and the decade immediately following World War II. The discussion explores how dysfunction within the family and repressive religious beliefs eventuate in pressures that cause Jimmy, the protagonist, to act out transgressively, and then to turn inwards to seek refuge in the form of self-containment that makes him a prototype of the Man Alone figure that is ubiquitous in New Zealand fiction.


Author(s):  
Mark Franko

This book is an examination of neoclassical ballet initially in the French context before and after World War I (circa 1905–1944) with close attention to dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar. Since the critical discourses analyzed indulged in flights of poetic fancy a distinction is made between the Lifar-image (the dancer on stage and object of discussion by critics), the Lifar-discourse (the writings on Lifar as well as his own discourse), and the Lifar-person (the historical actor). This topic is further developed in the final chapter into a discussion of the so-called baroque dance both as a historical object and as a motif of contemporary experimentation as it emerged in the aftermath of World War II (circa 1947–1991) in France. Using Lifar as a through-line, the book explores the development of critical ideas of neoclassicism in relation to his work and his drift toward a fascist position that can be traced to the influence of Nietzsche on his critical reception. Lifar’s collaborationism during the Occupation confirms this analysis. The discussion of neoclassicism begins in the final years of the nineteenth-century and carries us through the Occupation; then track the baroque in its gradual development from the early 1950s through the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document